Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (48 page)

1.
The sequence starts with a small kerosene lamp placed beside a curtained window.

2.
The flame from the lamp catches on the window curtain.

3.
The fire department sends a stream of water through the window to douse the flame.

4.
The stream of water lands on the head of a bearded man.

5.
The bearded man thinks it’s raining and reaches for an umbrella, which is attached to a string looped over a pair of pulleys.

6.
When the bearded man grabs the umbrella, the string lifts the end of a small platform.

7.
An iron ball on the end of the platform rolls off, pulling another string, which is attached to a hammer.

8.
The hammer hits a glass plate.

9.
The sound of breaking glass wakes a puppy sleeping in a cradle that has a back-scratcher attached to one of its rockers.

10.
As the puppy’s mother rocks the cradle to quiet the puppy, the back-scratcher moves up and down against a man’s back.

1.
The sequence starts with a clock attached high on a wall with a cylindrical weight hanging from it.

2.
At 6:30, as the clock’s hands are both pointing down, the weight drops onto the head of a man sitting in a chair, smoking a cigar.

3.
The man yells in pain and the cigar drops from his mouth.

4.
The cigar falls onto a pile of paper, setting it on fire.

5.
The heat from the fire enrages the man’s wife, who’s sitting in a chair suspended above the pile of paper.

6.
The angry wife sharpens a knife on a grindstone, which sits on a small platform before her.

7.
The grindstone is attached to a wheel. When the grindstone turns, the wheel also starts to turn.

8.
A handle on the wheel has a string tied to it, and the string is looped over a pulley. The other end of the string is tied to a spoon,
which dangles at the mouth of a tall jar of olives. When the wheel turns, the spoon descends into the jar and fishes out an olive.

9.
If the spoon can’t grab an olive, 15 minutes later another clock (on the floor) automatically runs a glass cutter against the jar and breaks out a piece of glass large enough to accommodate a finger.

1.
The sequence starts at a window. A pulley is attached to the windowsill; the string of a kite is looped around the pulley.

2.
The window is opened and the kite flies outside.

3.
When the kite is aloft, the string—which runs under one pulley and over two pulleys attached to the ceiling—becomes taut and raises a small door in a cage sitting on top of a pole.

4.
Moths escape from the cage and eat a flannel shirt hanging from the end of another string looped over another pair of pulleys.

5.
As the shirt gets lighter (from being eaten), a shoe that’s dangling from the other end of that string drops and steps on a switch.

6.
The switch turns on an electric iron that’s resting flat on a pair of pants on an ironing board. The iron burns a hole in the pants.

7.
The smoke from the pants funnels through a tube into the trunk of a hollow tree and smokes out an opossum living in the tree.

8.
The opossum jumps out of the tree into a basket hanging from one of the branches. A string attached to the basket is looped over the branch and tied to the top of a birdcage.

9.
When the opossum lands in the basket, the string lifts the cover of the birdcage and a woodpecker inside the cage leans forward and chews the end of a pencil attached to short clamp. The pencil is sharpened. (If the opossum or the woodpecker gets sick and can’t do his job, there’s an emergency penknife nearby.)

Purdue University holds an annual Rube Goldberg Machine Contest where teams of college students build Rube Goldberg-style contraptions no larger than 5’ high, 6’ wide, and 6’ deep. The devices must complete simple tasks like replacing a light bulb, making a hamburger, or screwing a lid on a jar in 20 or more separate steps.

MC Hammer presented rap music in a way that made it accessible to mainstream pop audiences with hits like “U Can’t Touch This” and “2 Legit 2 Quit.” But just five years later, rap had evolved into hard-edged, profanity- and violence-laden “gangsta rap.” Result: MC Hammer, with his smiling face, Saturday morning cartoon show, and shiny parachute pants, was passé. So he decided to make a gangsta rap album. In 1995 he signed with Death Row Records—the biggest rap label of the day and home to 2Pac, Dr. Dre, and Snoop Dogg—and recorded
Too Tight
, with contributions from Death Row staff writers and a cameo from 2Pac. When 2Pac was murdered in 1996 (possibly by people connected to a rival rap label), MC Hammer realized that his new label was a dangerous place to be. He left Death Row and shortly after filed for bankruptcy. He became a minister, which inspired a series of reflective, spiritually based albums. Death Row has since gone out of business, and gangsta rap itself is now becoming passé, so
Too Tight
will probably never see the light of day.

Prince is well known for being a prolific songwriter and recording artist who supposedly has a vault full of thousands of unreleased songs.
Dream Factory
was a planned project that was completed but never released. On breaks from his 1985 Hit & Run Tour, Prince popped into recording studios around the world to record the
Dream Factory
tracks, which included an instrumental piano piece, a 10-minute hard-rocking anti-war song, a song built around train sound effects, and a 1930s-style jazz number (Prince even sang it through a megaphone). It was the most avant-garde album Prince had recorded to that point. By June 1986, he had a polished 18-track double LP, containing some songs recorded with his band, the Revolution, and others recorded solo. But in October,
the temperamental star suddenly fired the Revolution and removed the band members’ contributions from
Dream Factory
. Combining his solo tracks with songs from a half-finished project called
Camille
, in which he sang like a woman with the aid of voice software, Prince assembled an even longer
triple
album called
Crystal Ball
. Prince’s label, Warner Bros., balked at an experimental triple LP and refused to release it. So, he dropped a third of the songs and called it
Sign ‘O’ the Times
, a double album that went on to critical and commercial success.

In 1973, Young recorded
Tonight’s the Night,
a sad, mournful album recorded in reaction to the drug-overdose deaths of two friends. His label, RCA, refused to release it, claiming it was “uncommercial.” Young made and released
On the Beach
instead before delving into another dark, highly personal album called
Homegrown
, about the breakup of his relationship with actress Carrie Snodgress. He then held a listening party for
Homegrown
and found a copy of
Tonight’s the Night
on the same reel
.
Young’s guests were ambivalent about
Homegrown
but loved
Tonight’s the Night.
Young agreed. (Apparently the album about drug overdoses was less depressing than the one about the end of the love affair.) So, he convinced RCA to shelve
Homegrown—
even though a cover had already been designed and printed—and release
Tonight’s the Night
instead. Many of the songs on
Homegrown
turned up on later Young albums, but the album in whole form remains locked away.

For rabid fans of the rap/rock group, this shelved dance-music album is their most coveted and controversial recording. In 1988 the Beastie Boys left their longtime label Def Jam Records for Capitol Records, where they recorded the hit album
Paul’s Boutique.
Def Jam president Russell Simmons was furious at the band for jumping ship. So he hired Public Enemy rapper/producer Chuck D to craft a new Beastie Boys album to compete with
Paul’s Boutique
…without the Beastie Boys. Simmons gave Chuck D unused vocal outtakes from old Beastie Boys sessions with instructions to set them to dance beats. When Chuck D found out that
White House
was being done against the band’s wishes, he backed out, and the nearly completed project was abandoned.

GREEN SLIME.
In the 1980s, Nickelodeon aired a show called
You Can’t Do That on Television
in which cast members got “slimed”—dumped with buckets of green slime. Cashing in on the fad, General Mills came out with Green Slime Cereal, chunky, green-colored “slime-shaped” cornmeal puffs (almost as bad as slime) that consisted of a whopping 47% sugar.

 

EAT MY SHORTS.
What’s less appetizing than green slime? Used underwear. Based on the catchphrase made famous by Bart Simpson, with this underwear-shaped cereal, produced in 2003, you could literally eat Bart’s (sugar and cornmeal) shorts.

 

OJ’s.
Orange and milk flavors go together nicely in a Creamsicle, but evidently not in a breakfast cereal. Orange-flavored OJ’s were released in 1984 and gone by the end of the year.

 

ADDAMS FAMILY CEREAL.
Ralston-Purina released this as a tie-in for the
Addams Family
movie in 1991. Ads called it “the weird part of a complete breakfast,” and it was: The cereal and marshmallow bits were shaped like skulls and severed hands.

 

CRUNCHY LOGGS.
Possibly the most aptly named—and least appetizing—breakfast food ever produced. The 1978 cereal was little brown “logs” made out of corn and oats. And they were crunchy. (Although little brown “logs” makes Uncle John think of something besides cereal.)

 

BIGG MIXX.
It seems as if Kellogg’s took whatever Corn Flakes, Raisin Bran, Rice Krispies, and other cereals were left at the end of the day, mixed them up, and threw them in a single box. The advertising character concocted to match the cereal was “Bigg Mixx,” a weird, mutated combination of a chicken, a wolf, a moose, and a pig. The cereal was released with a huge advertising campaign in 1990…and quickly disappeared into obscurity.