Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (43 page)

In January 1972, Vesna Vulovic was working as a flight attendant for Yugoslav Airlines. An hour into a flight from Denmark to Yugoslavia, an engine suddenly exploded, ripping the plane apart and sending 27 people plunging more than 33,000 feet to their deaths. But not Vulovic. The explosion thrust her into part of the fuselage, which crashed into a snow-covered hill. Somehow, Vulovic survived—she fell into a coma when she crashed, but awoke three days later in a hospital. In less than a year, she had fully recovered and become a national hero in Yugoslavia. She still gets noticed in public, especially when she flies. “People always want to sit next to me,” Vulovic says.

In 2009 the average movie ticket costs $9.00. Where does all the money go? According to
Money
magazine,

• $.61 goes to pay the actors.

• $.90 covers distribution, such as prints and shipping the movie reels to theaters.

• $1.54 goes to the studio that made the movie.

• $1.90 goes to cover marketing costs (previews, advertising, etc.).

• $4.05 goes to the movie theater itself.

How We Use It:
To skim or browse written material quickly to get the gist

What It Really Means:
The opposite—to read it thoroughly and carefully

How We Use It:
Extremely obvious or unabashedly conspicuous

What It Really Means:
Offensively loud or noisy

How We Use It:
Indifferent

What It Really Means:
Impartial (as in lacking a conflict of interest)

How We Use It:
And

What It Really Means:
It’s a subtle difference, but “plus” means “added to” or “increased by,” not “another”

How We Use It:
Now
What It Really Means:
Soon

How We Use It:
Reluctant
What It Really Means:
Inclination to be quiet

How We Use It:
A lucky happenstance for the good

What It Really Means:
Any chance action, good or bad

How We Use It:
Eagerly looking forward to an upcoming event

What It Really Means:
Full of anxiety; dreading an upcoming event

How We Use It:
Very clean, perfectly spotless

What It Really Means:
Unchanged from its original state

How We Use It:
The beginning of the day—sunrise

What It Really Means:
The twilight just
before
sunrise

One day in late 1896, the Reverend Prescott F. Jernegan approached Arthur P. Ryan, a jeweler in Middletown, Connecticut. He told Ryan that he was quitting the preaching business and entering a new field of work: God had come to him in a vision, he said, and told him how to build a device that could extract gold from seawater. He had been working on the device for years, he said, and had finally perfected it. And he wanted Ryan to verify that it worked.

Jernegan was a member of an old and respected New England family, not to mention a respected local preacher, and it
had
been discovered a few years earlier that there are indeed trace amounts of gold in seawater. Ryan trusted Jernegan, so he agreed to test the device.

Jernegan’s “Gold Accumulator,” as he called it, was a wooden box whose interior was lined with zinc. It had holes cut into its sides, which allowed water to enter it. Inside the box was a battery connected to a metal pan. If you put mercury into the pan, along with a “secret ingredient,” Jernegan explained to Ryan, and then lowered the box into seawater, the electrified mercury-and-secret-ingredient mix would absorb the gold out of the water.

Ryan and several colleagues took the Gold Accumulator to the coastal town of Providence, Rhode Island. Jernegan refused to go along—to assure them that he wouldn’t be able to somehow falsify or influence the results of the test. Ryan and the others lowered the device off a pier into the water and spent the night in a nearby shed to make sure nobody interfered with it. In the morning, they pulled it back up and opened it. What did they
find? Flakes of gold in the pan. There was only a little gold—maybe a couple of dollars’ worth—but Jernegan’s plan was to build a seaside factory with more than 1,000 accumulators. Ryan and the others believed they’d be rich and quickly signed on to invest in the project.

Over the following few months, Jernegan built several more accumulators and, along with his longtime friend and assistant, Charles E. Fisher, founded the Electrolytic Marine Salts Company, based in Boston, Massachusetts. In the fall of 1897, they signed an agreement with Ryan and several prominent Boston investors to take the company public, with Jernegan and Fisher getting 40 percent of the proceeds from the stock sale. Share price: $1. More than 350,000 shares sold in three days. An elaborate factory was built in the remote town of North Lubec, Maine, and within weeks the accumulators were taking $150 worth of gold from the sea every day. Newspapers all over the country wrote about the success of the company, and in the months that followed, the number of shares sold climbed to more than a million. Jernegan, Fisher, Ryan and the others were all becoming very rich men. And it looked like they were just getting started.

But then, in July 1898, Fisher disappeared. And, strangely, the gold accumulators stopped working.

What was wrong with the accumulators? Fisher wasn’t there to seed them anymore. He was a trained deep sea diver, and right from the start he’d been diving down to the accumulators at night and seeding them with gold that he and Jernegan had purchased earlier. When investors went to Jernegan to find out what was wrong, he told them he’d get to the bottom of it…and fled to France with his family. He was found there but disappeared again before he could be arrested. (He eventually ended up in the Philippines, where he became a teacher.) Fisher was never seen again, though some reports say he went to Australia. The scam made the men in the neighborhood of $200,000 each…millions in today’s money. It remains one of the most successful financial hoaxes in U.S. history.

In 2002 in Warren County, Ohio, Judge Mark Wiest introduced a unique program to discourage repeat offenses by low-level criminals: a book club. People convicted of misdemeanors and minor felonies (for which the sentence is 100 hours of community service) have to read six books in 12 weeks and attend discussion sessions. If they do, Wiest knocks 60 hours off the sentence. “Usually we’re telling them when they’re on probation, ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that.’ This just gives them something more positive.” The reading list includes Stephen King’s
The Green Mile
and John Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men.

Houston man James Lee Cross was convicted on a domestic abuse charge in 2004 for slapping his wife. Judge Larry Standley sentenced Cross to a year of probation, anger management training…and a yoga class once a week for a year. Standley said that anger leads to a lack of control, which leads to violence, and that the yoga could give Cross that control. “For people who are into it,” Standley said, “it really calms them down.”

In 2007 in Painesville, Ohio, Judge Michael Cicconetti introduced a new punishment for men convicted of soliciting prostitutes. Rather than go to jail, offenders spend three hours walking up and down a busy street…in a chicken suit. They also have to hold a sign that reads, “No Chicken Ranch in Our City /
No Gallinero En Nuestro Ciudad
.” The Chicken Ranch is a famous Nevada brothel; the sign is bilingual because many people in the area speak only Spanish and Cicconetti doesn’t think anyone should miss out on the convict’s humiliation. Cicconetti frequently issues bizarre punishments:

• He ordered teens who painted graffiti on the baby Jesus statue in a church nativity scene to dress up as Mary and Joseph and walk around town with a donkey, carrying a sign that read, “Sorry for the Jackass Offense.”

• He sentenced two teenagers who shot paintball pellets at a neighbor’s house to shoot paintball pellets at their own cars and then clean them up.

• He forced a man who called a policeman a “pig” to stand next to a live pig with a sign that read, “This Is Not a Police Officer.”

Like thousands of others, Kim Horn fled New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina tore through the city in 2005. She moved to Mason, Michigan, where, after telling her landlord her situation, she got free rent. Only problem: Horn wasn’t a refugee. She wasn’t even from New Orleans. In June 2006, after Horn was convicted on fraud charges, Judge Beverly Nettles-Nickerson sentenced her to six months of cleaning the house she’d lived in rent-free.

A 17-year-old boy in Olathe, Kansas, told his friends that he was planning to play a major prank on David Young, the teacher of the Spanish class he was failing. On the last day of school in June 2005, he walked up to Young…and vomited on him. Johnson County Judge Michael Farley found the teen (he’s a minor, so his name was withheld from the media) guilty of battery and sentenced him to four months of cleaning up the vomit of people who throw up in police cars.

If you’re driving through Fort Lupton, Colorado, keep the hard rock, rap, or other abrasive music turned down. Otherwise, Judge Paul Sacco may convict you of violating the town’s noise ordinance. The punishment: an hour of easy listening. Sacco has been doling out the sentence for more than 15 years. His favorite “punishments”: Barry Manilow, Carpenters, and Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You.”

PAWLISH
($11.95). Give your dog a “pet-icure” with this line of nontoxic, quick-drying nail polish for dogs. Choose from Poodle Pink, Bow Wow Green, Mutt’s New Purple, Fire Hydrant Red, Yuppy Puppy Silver, and Doghouse Blues. (Ironically, “Pawlish is tested on people, not animals.”)

 

SONGS TO MAKE DOGS HAPPY
($15.98). This CD is the brainchild of two Los Angeles-based musicians, Skip Haynes and Dana Walden. With the help of an “animal communicator” named Dr. Kim Ogden, they test-marketed different sets of lyrics and musical styles at L.A.-area animal shelters. All of the tracks are upbeat, and none include the word “no” or any sudden noises.

 

PENTHOUSE DOG POTTY
($319). It’s a big, fancy litter box, but instead of litter, it’s covered with artificial grass. Underneath is a drainage system (basically a bucket) to dispose of #1. For the other “duty,” you do the same thing you’d do outside—scoop it up.

 

DIAMOND BONE PENDANT
($2,900). From Bark Avenue Jewelers, this pricey bling is supposed to be worn on your dog’s collar. It features 30 diamonds set in 14-karat gold. (Also available in platinum.)

 

SLAVE LEIA DOG COSTUME
($14.99).
StarWarsShop.com
offers the Princess Leia Slave Girl Dog Costume so you and your pooch can recreate Jabba the Hutt’s palace scene from
Return of the Jedi
. Or, if you’d prefer that your dog teach you how to use the Force, you can get him the official Yoda Dog Costume.

 

NEUTICLES
. These are silicon implants designed to replace neutered dogs’ missing “bits.” According to Gregg Miller, who invented Neuticles in 1993, they’re not just for vanity, but they control pet overpopulation “by encouraging thousands of caring pet owners to neuter that simply would not have before.” Cost: $170 per set (neutering and implantation not included).