Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader (61 page)

Two of the men who jumped from Rojohn’s plane didn’t survive, and the unfortunate Russo was believed to have been killed on impact. But four of the jumpers did survive, as well as four who had evacuated from the lower plane. Ten of the two planes’ sixteen crewmembers were saved by Rojohn and Leek’s determination. All ten were taken prisoner (one was interrogated by the Germans for two weeks about the new “secret weapon”), and all were released at war’s end five months later.

AFTERMATH

After the war, Captain Rojohn went home to Pennsylvania, got married, and had two children, but through the years he searched military and Social Security records to find his copilot. In 1986 his efforts finally paid off when he got the phone number of Leek’s mother in Washington state. When he called her, she said that her son, who had moved to California, happened to be in town for a visit and was standing right there. In 1987 the two pilots met for the first time in 43 years. The details of their conversation remained private; William Leek died a year later.

In 1994 the flight came back into Rojohn’s life when a German author sent him a book about the history of Wangerooge during the war years, including an entire chapter on the piggyback flight. Little did Rojohn know that it was part of northern German legend, and that some people even celebrated it every New Year’s Eve. The author was looking for survivors of the flight, hoping they could come to the 50th anniversary celebration.

One for the road: Errol Flynn was buried with six bottles of whiskey.

Rojohn received the letter too late for the anniversary, but he contacted the author and, in 1996, he and his wife, Janie, visited the island of Wangerooge and then went to the pasture on the German mainland where Rojohn and Leek had crash-landed 52 years earlier. They were interviewed by reporters from all over Germany, and a TV station even organized a reenactment of the flight. “They flew me out over the North Sea to where I had the midair collision,” he said. “Then they flew me over the exact route. It was a very emotional time. When we landed on the island, they told me to look up. I saw that they had hoisted the American flag for me. I can’t tell you how that made me feel.”

POSTSCRIPT

In 1997 Gordon Hildebrand, 70, of Wasco, Oregon, saw an article in
World War II
magazine about the piggyback flight. Hildebrand had grown up next door to the family of William MacNab, the pilot of the
other
plane. MacNab was just 19 when the crash occurred, and his parents had never found out how their son had died. They were only told that their son was missing in action. MacNab’s parents were long dead, but Hildebrand called MacNab’s siblings, who, after 53 years, finally learned their brother’s fate.

The MacNab family contacted Rojohn. They invited him to Oregon, where he was welcomed as a hero, even serving as the grand marshal of Wasco’s Memorial Day parade. “It was almost like Bill came home,” Hildebrand said. Ann Phillips, one of MacNab’s surviving sisters, told the
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
, “I’ll never forget Glenn Rojohn. He was an answer to a prayer. He brought me closure after all those years waiting for news.” In 1999 Hildebrand and two of MacNab’s cousins flew to Pennsylvania to attend a regular luncheon held for Air Force veterans. They gave Rojohn a plaque that read: “You have filled a void in our lives with your presence and become a member of our family and a friend forever.” Glenn H. Rojohn died on August 9, 2003, at the age of 81. He was the last survivor of the flight.

Every year, about 43 million tons of dust settle over the United States.

THE ROBOTS ARE COMING!

In preparation for the inevitable day when robots rise up and take over the world, you may want to familiarize yourself with these recent advancements in robot technology
.

C
LONEBOTS
Scientists at Cornell University have built a small robot that can make copies of itself. The robot is made of several 10-centimeter-wide modules, each of which is fitted with electromagnets (so they can be attached to other modules) and a computerized replication program. Using the program, the robot can take single modules—the same ones of which it is made—and stack them, constructing a clone of itself. Scientists hope to use the technology to make self-repairing robots.

POOBOTS

Experts at the University of the West of England in Bristol have developed a robot that creates its own power supply: it attracts flies, then eats them, then turns them into electricity. But there’s a catch. The “EcoBot II” uses a reserve of human excrement to attract the flies. The robot digests the bugs in eight fuel cells. It uses the bacteria from the excrement to break down the sugars in the flies, releasing electrons that create an electric current. The scientists’ goal is to eventually make the EcoBot II predatory, finding and devouring flies on its own whenever it senses that its energy reserves are low. Until then, however, it has to be manually fed fistfuls of dead flies to supplement those attracted by the poop.

JOCKBOTS

In May 2005, teams of scholars from colleges around the world met at the Georgia Institute of Technology for the RoboCup U.S. Open, a series of five robotic competitions. The aim of the contest was to develop a team of robots that by the year 2050 will be technologically advanced enough to play soccer against a human team. Among the events: five-inch-tall robots play soccer with a golf ball; robot dogs play soccer; and teams of humans play soccer against robots while riding Segway power scooters.

The first “cartoons” with speech balloons were drawn by the early Aztecs.

JOCKEYBOTS

The most popular spectator sport in the United Arab Emirates is camel racing. The traditional choice for camel jockeys has always been children—they’re small and lightweight. Until now. When human rights groups actively started to condemn the practice as a form of slavery, U.A.E. Interior Minister Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan found an alternative: he hired several private high-tech labs to create a generation of
robot
jockeys. The tiny, human-looking robots are smaller and lighter than child jockeys and respond to commands via a remote control system mounted on the camel.

BALLBOTS

The University of Uppsala, Sweden, has developed a new security system and burglar deterrent: a ten-pound robot in the shape of a 20-inch black ball. Equipped with radar and infrared sensors, when it senses an intruder, it follows one of many preprogrammed courses of action: it can dial the police, sound an alarm, repeatedly take the burglar’s picture, or pursue the thief at up to 20 mph—faster than a human being. It even gives chase over water, mud, and ice.

DOCBOT

A robot used at the University of California–San Francisco Medical Center for delivering medicine to patients’ rooms ran amok in June 2005. Rather than going to the hospital pharmacy to pick up medications as programmed, Waldo the Robot sped past the pharmacy at a high speed and zoomed wildly into the hospital’s cancer ward. Waldo barged into an examination room where a doctor was administering radiation treatment to a cancer patient and then he finally stopped…for good. He suddenly wouldn’t move, leave the room, or respond to commands. The patient, however, ran out of the room, screaming in terror.

*        *        *

“It’s not so much how busy you are, but why you are busy. The bee is praised; the mosquito is swatted.”

—
Marie O’Conner

Arnold Schwarzenegger holds a degree in marketing and business administration.

LET’S DO A STUDY!

If you’re worried that the really important things in life aren’t being researched by our scientists…keep worrying
.

I
n 2004 researchers at Odeon Cinemas determined that celebrities making appearances at awards shows and movie premieres expose an average of 59 percent of their skin. That’s up from 39 percent in 1994. After scanning thousands of celebrity photographs and videos, they also determined that the least skin-flaunting decade was the 1970s, when stars showed off just 7 percent. If the trend continues at this rate, the researchers say, movie stars will be 75 percent naked by 2010. (Woo hoo!)

• Thirty medical students at University College of London studied Gollum, a character in the
Lord of the Rings
trilogy, and determined that his split personality, spiteful behavior, wild mood swings, and extreme paranoia indicate a presence of schizophrenia and/or multiple personality disorder. In addition, his bulging eyes and slight, skeletal body suggest a thyroid problem.

• Why has the redheaded, baby-faced Belgian comic-book sleuth Tintin seemed to remain the same age over the course of 50 years? According to Claude Cyr of Sherbrooke University in Quebec, it’s not because the authors chose to keep him that way. Cyr studied 23 comics and found that Tintin lost consciousness nearly 50 times, concluding that this string of accidents delayed Tintin’s physical growth as well as the onset of adolescence.

• Researchers at the University of Hungary in Budapest analyzed videos of sporting events at which the “Wave” was being performed. They noted it almost always moves clockwise around the stadium, travels at a speed of about 40 feet per second, and that the average width of a wave is 15 rows of seats.

• In 2005 Children’s Hospital in Boston announced that according to their research, eating a lot of fast food leads to obesity. Doctors observed 3,000 young people in a cardiac health study and discovered that the kids who ate burgers and fries more than twice a week gained an average of 10 pounds more than those who ate fast food less than once a week.

Too much information? The human body produces about 7 miles of hair per year.

THE CURSE OF THE ICEMAN

In
Uncle John’s Ultimate Bathroom Reader,
we told you about the 5,300-year-old “Iceman” that was found in the Austrian Alps in 1991. Now it seems he’s cursed the people who disturbed his resting place. Is it possible? Read on and decide for yourself…if you dare
.

B
ACKGROUND
In September 1991, some people hiking high in the Tyrolean Alps along the Austrian/Italian border found a body sticking out of a melting glacier. It turned out to be the world’s oldest fully preserved human, and the first ever found with “everyday clothing and equipment,” including a copper axe, a dagger, and a bow with arrows. Because the body was found in a small protective basin that would have provided shelter from bad weather, archaeologists initially assumed that he got caught in a freak storm, sought shelter in the basin, and then froze to death.

In the years that followed the discovery, scientists subjected the remains to countless medical and diagnostic tests to see what they could learn about it. When they ran a CAT scan (a procedure similar to an X-ray), they made a startling discovery: the Iceman had a flint arrowhead lodged in his shoulder. Then, when the scientists reexamined a surviving fragment of the Iceman’s coat, they noticed a tear in the coat that matched the arrowhead’s location in his shoulder. DNA tests on the Iceman’s knife and from one of his arrows revealed traces of blood from three different humans. He also had fresh, deep cuts on his hands, wrists, and chest.

Based on this evidence, the scientists came up with a new theory on how the Iceman died: he wasn’t killed by the weather, he was shot in the back during a fight.

CURSED?

It stands to reason that the Iceman—also called Oetzi, or Ötzi, because he was discovered in the Ötztal Alps—would be mad at the people who killed him. But is he also angry at the people who, 5,300 years later, disturbed his resting place? In the 14 years since his body was discovered, several people associated with the discovery have died. Consider what happened to these people:

World record: Germans eat the most sugar (about 32 lb. per person per year).

•
Helmut Simon
, 67, the man who, along with his wife Erika, first stumbled on the Iceman while hiking through the Tyrolean Alps in 1991. In October 2004, Simon returned to the Alps for his first visit since finding the body. On October 15, he went on another hike, in what seemed to be good weather, but was caught in a freak blizzard. Several days later his frozen body was found at the bottom of a 300-foot cliff. “We only get one or two deaths a year from people caught in bad weather,” a spokesperson for the Austrian mountain rescue service told reporters after Simon’s body was recovered. “For this to happen to the man who discovered the Iceman, and for his life to be claimed in the same way as that of his discovery, has caused a lot of people to take seriously the question of whether there really is a curse on those who moved the body.”

•
Dr. Rainer Henn
, 64, head of the forensic team that removed the Iceman from the glacier and transported the body to a laboratory in Innsbruck, Austria. Henn died in a car accident in 1992 while on his way to give a lecture on Oetzi.

•
Kurt Fritz
, 52, the climbing guide who led Dr. Henn to the place where the Iceman was discovered. In 1993 Fritz was killed in an avalanche. And he was the
only
one killed—the other members of his climbing party were spared.

•
Rainer Hoelzl
, 47, the Austrian television journalist who was granted permission to film the Iceman’s removal from the glacier. Not long afterward Hoelzl was diagnosed with a brain tumor; he died in 2004.