Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader (34 page)

The catacombs beneath the city of Paris contain the bones of more than 3 million bodies.

“Doughty, 48, who owns the establishment, entered the bar from his office and told the two patrons and bartender that he was going to shoot his computer. He then set his laptop on the floor, warned the customers to cover their ears and fired away. Doughty never explained what prompted his actions, but told police that ‘it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.’”

—Court TV

KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE PRIZE, NOT THE PIES

“A 280-lb. thief broke into a Romanian bakery and stole $250, but couldn’t resist the sweet temptation. He got stuck trying to exit through a window—after stuffing himself full of pies. The 29-year-old man was still stuck there in the morning when the shop owner, Vasile Mandache, arrived for work. He said, ‘I saw all the pie wrappers on the floor, and then saw a pair of stubby, fat legs hanging out the window. I just had to call my friends to come and have a look before we called the police, it was so funny.’”

—Short News

A PIG’S RANSOM

“‘Raw fruit and vegetables—or else the pigs get it!’ That’s what a Gallatin, Tennessee, woman read in a ransom note after a pair of concrete swine were swiped from her front yard. The foot-tall plaster porkers, one dressed in farmer’s overalls and the other in a pink dress, vanished from in front of Mary Romines’ trailer. Other pieces of statuary, including concrete chickens and a few other pigs, were disturbed, but not taken. Tacked to the front gate was a note with a specific demand: two ears of corn and one ripe mango.

“Two days after the piggies, worth about $10 each, flew the coop, Romines got another menacing message—a well-done pork chop attached to a note reading, ‘Cooked the Pig.’ The next night, another note raised the demands—a potato in addition to the corn and mango. Signed ‘The Big Bad Wolf’ and accompanied by a bag of pork rinds, the note asked Romines if she was scared. ‘They think they have me buffaloed, but now I’m mad,’ Romines said. ‘They may think it’s funny, but they’re going to be charged with theft.’ Police agreed that the perpetrator will be criminally charged. The case remains under investigation.”

—Fox News

2 in 3 Americans believe in telepathy; 1 in 6 Canadians do.

THE SAD TALE OF CENTRALIA

On Valentine’s Day, 1981, eleven-year-old Todd Domboski was walking through a field in Centralia, Pennsylvania, when a 150-foot-deep hole suddenly opened beneath his feet. Noxious fumes crept out as the boy fell in. He only survived by clinging to some newly exposed tree roots until his cousin ran over and pulled him to safety. What was happening here…and why?

C
OAL COUNTRY
Eastern Pennsylvania is anthracite coal country. Back at the turn of the 20th century, miners were digging nearly 300 million tons of coal per year from the region, leaving behind a vast subterranean network of abandoned mine shafts. In May 1962, while incinerating garbage in an old strip mine pit outside of Centralia, one of the many exposed coal seams ignited. The fire followed the seam down into the maze of abandoned mines and began to spread. And it kept spreading—and burning—for years.

Mine fires in coal country are actually not all that uncommon. There are currently as many as 45 of them burning in Pennsylvania alone. Unfortunately, there’s no good way to put them out. But that doesn’t stop people from trying.

• The most effective method to extinguish such a fire is to strip mine around the entire perimeter of the blaze. That’s an expensive—and in populated areas, impractical—proposition. Essentially, it means digging an enormous trench, deep enough to get underneath the fires, which are often more than 500 feet below ground.

• An easier (but not much easier) method is to bore holes down into the old mine shafts, and then pour in tons of wet concrete to make plugs. Then more holes are drilled and flame-suppressing foam is pumped into the areas between plugs. It, too, is a very expensive project, and it doesn’t always succeed.

The cheapest way to deal with a mine fire by far is to keep an eye on it and hope it burns itself out. (One fire near Lehigh, Pennsylvania, burned from 1850 until the 1930s.) After a 1969 effort to dig out the Centralia fire proved both costly and unsuccessful, they admitted defeat and let the fire take its course. By 1980, the size of the underground blaze was estimated at 350 acres, and large clouds of noxious smoke were billowing out of the ground all over town. The ground temperature under a local gas station was recorded at nearly 1,000°F. Residents of the once-thriving mountain town began to wonder if Centralia was a safe place to live.

May Day (May 1) is celebrated as Lei Day in Hawaii.

When the boy fell in the hole and almost died, the fire beneath Centralia became a national news story. The sinkhole—caused by an effect known as
subsidence
, which occurs when mine shafts collapse, possibly because the support beams are on fire—put the town’s 1,600 residents in a fix. Their homes were suddenly worthless. They couldn’t sell them and move someplace safer—no one in their right mind would buy them.

The townsfolk were given a choice: a $660-million digging project that might not work, or let the government buy their homes. They voted 345 to 200 in favor of the buyout, and an exodus soon began. By 1991, $42 million had been spent buying out more than 540 Centralia homes and businesses.

GHOST TOWN

If you were to visit Centralia today, the first thing you’d notice is that there are more streets than buildings. At first glance, it would seem that someone decided to build a town, but only got as far as paving the roads. If you looked a bit closer, however, you’d notice the remnants of house foundations. Looking still closer, you’d see smoke still seeping out of the ground.

As of 2005, twelve die-hard Centralians reportedly continue to live in the smoldering ghost town. The number has dwindled since a decade ago, when nearly fifty holdouts still called it home. Experts estimate it will take 250 years for the fire to burn itself out.

*        *        *

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

—
Abraham Lincoln

Time it: A typical spoken sentence in ordinary conversation takes about 21.2 seconds.

THE DOCTOR IS OUT (OF HIS MIND)

Got a doctor’s appointment soon? Then don’t read this. Really
.

B
ONEHEADS
In January 2004, Briana Lane suffered serious head injuries in a car crash near Salt Lake City—so serious that doctors had to remove almost half of her skull to treat the bleeding in her brain. Lane was released in February…but without the missing portion of her skull, which remained behind in the hospital freezer. The skull was due to be replaced, but the day before the surgery, the hospital canceled the appointment: they wanted to wait to see if Medicaid would pay for the procedure. In the meantime, all Lane had over her brain was a flap of skin, and she had to wear a helmet to protect it. (She said that every morning she could feel that her brain had drooped to one side during the night.) Lane finally got her skull back in April
—four months
after the initial operation and only, she says, after she called a local TV station and told them the story. “When you think of weird things happening to people,” she said afterward, “you don’t think of this.”

GLITTERING GLUTEUS

A patient of a hospital in Orange County, Florida, sued the facility in 2005, saying they had wrongly injected cosmetic glitter into his buttocks. The lawsuit claimed that while the patient (who happens to be an undercover policeman) was undergoing sinus surgery in 2000, he was supposed to be injected with pain medication (Demeral), but that one of the shots “felt” wrong. “There was a lot of pain,” he said, “and I complained several times that something was wrong in my buttock.” Months later, a different doctor removed from the injection site a four-inch mass that contained “green and red sparkling material.” All parties agreed that there was, in fact, glitter in the man’s buttocks. But the court found that since so much time had elapsed, it could not be determined exactly when and at what facility the glitter had been injected. Amazingly, he lost the suit.

At a steady pace of 6 mph, it would take a jogger 173 days to circle the globe.

BRAIN DECAY

A dentist in Munich, Germany, was sued after deciding to save one of his patients some time—by giving her 14 root canals in one day. The dentist, whose name was not released to the press, fed the woman large glasses of cognac between each drilling during the 12-hour ordeal, telling her it would help ease the pain. Although she probably felt no pain during the operation, she sued because of the enormous pain she suffered for weeks afterward. According to standard dental practices, 14 root canals would normally be performed in several appointments over several weeks. The dentist was ordered to pay her $7,000 in compensation.

CROUTON-GATE

It’s not the doctor that’s out of his mind in this story—it’s the hospital. In 2004 the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham, England, suspended its top brain surgeon, Dr. Terence Hope, because he failed to pay for a bowl of soup and some croutons in the hospital cafeteria. The hospital had a 39-day waiting list for brain surgeries at the time. While outraged patients fumed at the hospital, the British news media had a field day over the fiasco. Hope, who had been with the hospital for 18 years and denied stealing any food, was back on the job five days later. A hospital spokesperson said that they had investigated the alleged soup-and-crouton crime, and conceded that it had been a misunderstanding.

SPIRITED TREATMENT

A couple in Bengal, India, was arrested in 2005 for treating several people with serious conditions such as appendicitis, gallstones, hernias, and tumors. Kohinoor Bibi and Majid Mandal aren’t doctors…so how did they treat their patients? By contacting “ghost doctors.” “I don’t treat the patients, the ghosts do,” said Mandal. “I am only a medium.” The couple charged about $60 for the treatments (a lot of money to the local villagers) and amassed a small fortune in their three-month run as healers. Mandal’s explanation for the exorbitant cost: “What we earn has to be shared with the ghosts—since they too have families.”

Largest wave ever surfed: Ridden by Pete Cabrinha, its face measured 70 feet high.

NUDES & PRUDES

Sometimes it seems like the world can be divided into two kinds of people: those who are offended by public nudity, and those who are offended by people who are offended by public nudity. Here are some of each
.

N
UDE:
In June 2004 a man from Rapid City, Iowa, was robbed by strangers after he answered the door in the nude. The man, whose name was not released by police, claimed he was sleeping in the buff when he was awakened by a knock on his hotel room door. When he answered the door he was tackled by “an undisclosed number of assailants” who hit him on the head and then ran off with his wallet and pants. Police later recovered the man’s pants from the hotel parking lot; at last report the wallet was still missing.

PRUDE:
A court in Karlsruhe, Germany, rejected an appeal from Dr. Peter Niehenke, a 55-year-old sex therapist who was fined $725 for indulging in his “hobby” of jogging nude near his home in Freiburg. Niehenke’s defense was that since there’s no law specifically banning him from jogging while wearing only socks and running shoes, technically the practice is not illegal. The judge didn’t buy it. “The court,” he said in his ruling, “does not support the defendant’s view that running naked in public is one of his civil rights.”

NUDE:
More nude news from Germany: In December 2004, an 81-year-old German man was robbed of 250 euros (about $300) when two young women asked him to strip naked with them and take a photograph. “After the pensioner had removed his trousers in eager anticipation, the women left in a hurry,” taking his pants and his wallet with them, a spokesperson for the Wiesbaden police department told reporters. The man’s name was withheld.

PRUDE:
In January 2005, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a La Habra, California, town ordinance that required strippers to remain at least two feet away from patrons at all times was legal. The court conceded that while the ordinance did infringe on the strippers’ right to free speech, “it did not
entirely
ban the performers from conveying an ‘erotic message,’” so the two-foot ordinance was constitutional.

Greek gods of the four winds: Boreus (North), Notus (South), Eurus (East), Zephyrus (West).

NUDE:
Police in Hillsborough, North Carolina, are on the lookout for a “hairy, big-bellied man with curly black hair” who likes to frequent a fast-food drive-through window in the buff. Police say the man has visited the same Bojangles restaurant several times over the years, but only started going nude in the summer of 2004. Before that he wore “only his underwear…or perhaps shorts that resemble underwear,” says Captain Ross Frederick of the Hillsborough Police Department.

PRUDE:
In December 2004, the city of Villahermosa, Mexico, passed a law banning nudity, even within the confines of a private home. Why the law? Because the city is so hot and humid, many people have taken to walking around nude in their homes, which many find offensive. “When people walk past their windows, you see a lot of things,” says city councilwoman Blanca Pulido, who supports the new law. Penalty for being nude in your own home: 36 hours in jail or a $121 fine.