Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader (37 page)

“Radio doesn’t seem interested in old folks like me, [even though] I feel like I’m doing the best work of my career right now. They say wisdom comes with age. Well, so does talent.”

“The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.”

“I’ve got more confidence than I do talent, I guess. I think confidence is the main achiever of success.”

“If people think I’m a dumb blonde because of the way I look, then they’re dumber than they think I am. If people think I’m not very deep because of my wigs and outfits, then they’re not very deep.”

“I look just like the girl next door...if you happen to live next door to an amusement park.”

Some of Gloria Steinem’s comments about women are controversial...but whether you agree with them or not, you’ll find them thought-provoking.

“I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.”

“Men should think twice before making widowhood women’s only path to power.”

“Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.”

“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”

“Jacqueline Onassis has a very clear understanding of marriage. I have a lot of respect for women who win the game with rules given you by the enemy.”

“Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren’t, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.”

“Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.”

“Every country has peasants—ours have money.”

“We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.”

“Women age, but men mature.”

On why she never married:
“I can’t mate in captivity.”

“One day, an army of gray-haired women may quietly take over the earth.”

“Someone once asked me why women don’t gamble as much as men do, and I gave the common sense reply that we don’t have as much money. That was a true but incomplete answer. In fact, women’s total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.”

“It may eventually turn out that men and women have similar degrees of aggressiveness, but for the next fifty years or so, until the sex roles are... reformed, women will be a good and peaceful influence in politics.”

On
page 123
, we shared an excerpt from Eva Newman’s book
Going Abroad.
Here are some more funny stories of her...experiences.

W
hile on an early morning animal viewing adventure in East Africa, nature may call and the guide will carefully search the landscape with his binoculars—for hungry lions. It is only after the area is secure from danger that the guide will release the passengers from the truck, with women to one side and men to the other.

Now what to do? Obviously, surrounded by such natural beauty, you are reluctant to pollute the landscape. You do not want to see young lions romping about in toilet paper.

The first step is to find some soft soil. If no shovel is available, dig a hole with the heel of your boot (people on safari usually wear boots or other sturdy footwear).

Squat and use the hole! Now, using the heel of your boot, kick the loose soil back over the hole until it’s covered. If a rock is available, you can further secure the hole by placing a rock over it.

In some areas, this procedure is called digging a “cat hole.” And don’t leave behind any “paper flowers.”

If you are in a desert region, or if the soil is too hard to dig, some people dispose of the toilet paper by bagging or burning. Since there is little rain in deserts, paper will not decompose for decades. Do we really want someone to have to deal with our dirty paper twenty years from now?

Note that using these holes in high winds is perilous. Be sure your feet are upwind of your rear.

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On a recent trip to Thailand, I was visiting a large and imposing tourist attraction in a big city. Despite careful investigation, I was unable to locate a toilet. It was necessary to ask.

Not speaking the language, I decided one of the guards who dealt often with tourists would
understand “toilet” in English. Sure enough, the guard did seem to understand and indicated with waving hands that I was to go down the street and around the corner.

I followed his instructions but found the street around the corner to be lined with a tall wall and parked cars. I cruised the block—but no toilet. Again I asked a local, “toilet?” She indicated I was to return the way I had come. Again, nothing. My instinct was that these people were far too kind and generous to be playing tricks on a stupid tourist. I knew there had to be a toilet.

I returned to the ticket booth of the tourist attraction and asked again. This time they indicated the same direction, but said “bus.” I repeated, “Bus?” They nodded. Ah, it was at a bus stop. I returned to the same block. Oh yes, there was a bus. I walked around it. No toilet.

But I noticed something odd about the bus. Against its front was a row of large potted plants, as if the bus wasn’t going anyplace. The door of the bus was open—and what was that familiar odor? A toilet?

I hesitantly approached the open door and asked the attendant for the toilet. Yes, she said and motioned me in. Sure enough, it was a bus of only toilets. It was used by both sexes. There were small (very small) closed stalls in the middle and urinals in the rear.

Each stall had its own water tap and a chemical-flush squat toilet. In the front of the bus was a wash sink and a desk for the attendant. How ingenious.

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In Hong Kong...after dining in a local noodle shop, I inquired for the facility. The manager was apologetic as he told me that the toilet might not meet my standards.

I told him that I did not care as I was in desperate need. He showed me through the kitchen, where helpers were washing dishes with a hose connected to an outside faucet.

We stopped at a small room off the kitchen. It had only a cement floor and a hole in the back wall at ground level! He told me to use the floor as I must and the kitchen ladies would hose the floor.

After this adventure I was very thankful I had my usual gamma globulin shot, together with every other kind of shot that offered health protection.

In her book
Happy Birthdays Around the World,
Lois Johnson explains how people in other countries celebrate their birthdays. A few examples:

C
HINA.
“A baby’s birthday is celebrated when he is thirty days old, and when he is a year old. Then there are no more celebrations until the tenth birthday. After that, every tenth year is celebrated for as long as the person lives. The most important date is the thirtieth anniversary, when a child becomes an adult.”

NIGERIA.
“Many children follow the old tribal custom of celebrating their birthdays as an age group, instead of having an individual birthday. The custom began in very early times, when there was no calendar. The only way the people had of marking their birthdays was by the reign of a certain king, or by some important event. People then, who were born during one of these periods, became an age group, and celebrated their birthdays together.”

THAILAND.
“According to tradition, if the parents of the child can afford it, the father and mother buy as many birds or fish, sometimes both, as their child is years old, plus one extra animal for the child to ‘grow on.’ After sprinkling each animal with blessed water, the boy or girl lets the birds fly free, and returns the fish to the waters of the river or canal. This ceremony is believed to insure the favor of the gods for the coming year.”

INDIA.
“On this day, the Hindu child does not have to go to school. Hindus believe that a special day such as a birthday is meant for prayer and celebration.”

KOREA.
“A baby’s first birthday is celebrated with great ceremony. The same sort of custom that is followed in other Asian countries is
observed in Korea. The mother and father lay all kinds of articles on a table—pencils, pieces of money, books, and strips of cloth. The baby is then set down in the middle, and whatever the baby reaches for is supposed to show what his future skills will be.”

GREAT BRITAIN.
“Sometimes well-meaning classmates may follow the British custom of ‘bumping.’ To wish the birthday child well, some of his friends will pick him up by the ankles while others will lift him under the armpits, and then they ‘bump’ him on the ground as many times as he is years old—with, of course, an extra ‘bump’ to grow on.”

SRI LANKA.
“The first birthday celebration comes when a Sri Lankan baby is thirty-one days old. Then, customarily, a close relative brings the baby a special gift. For a boy baby, it may be a gold chain; for a girl, gold arm bangles. The parents also present the new baby with a charm, made of copper in a scroll design, which is rolled into a gold-enclosed cylinder or tube. This charm is worn all through the person’s life and is supposed to protect them from harm.”

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GOOD OL’ AMERICAN INGENUITY

“Paragon Cable in New York recently began a new approach to customers with delinquent accounts. Instead of cutting off service altogether, which would create additional expense to restart when the customer paid up, Paragon merely fills the customers entire 77-channel lineup with C-SPAN. Paragon said the project had been successful.”

—
U.S. News & World Report
, July 31, 1995

You’ve heard the expression, Don’t believe everything you hear? Well, it turns out the rule also applies to rock bands.

T
HE MASKED MARAUDERS

In 1969, Greil Marcus wrote a story for
Rolling Stone
magazine claiming that the biggest rock stars of the day had gotten together and recorded an album. “This is indeed what it appears to be,” he wrote, “John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, and Bob Dylan, backed by George Harrison and a drummer as yet unnamed—the ‘Masked Marauders.’ The album was recorded with impeccable secrecy in a small town near the site of the original Hudson Bay Colony in Canada.” The magazine even printed a Masked Marauders album cover with the article.

The Truth:
Marcus made the whole thing up. When the article generated attention, he cashed in on it, hiring some “musicians” to record an album—complete with songs like “Mammy” and “I Can’t Get No Nookie.” It was an outrageous rip-off, but nothing on the album cover indicated that it was a joke. So people who believed what they read in
Rolling Stone
and rushed out to buy the album had no idea they were really getting a tone-deaf fake.

MILLI VANILLI

In 1990, Arista Records released
Girl, You Know It’s True
, the debut album for a pop duo Milli Vanilli, made up of Fabrice Morvan, a Frenchman, and Robert Pilatus, a German.

It was a spectacular hit, selling more than 10 million copies worldwide—including 7 million in the United States. The album won several American Music Awards, as well as the 1990 Grammy for best new artists. “Musically,” Pilatus told reporters, “we are more talented than any Bob Dylan. Musically, we are more talented than Paul McCartney. Mick Jagger, his lines are not clear. He don’t know how he should produce a sound. I’m the new modern rock ‘n’ roll. I’m the new Elvis.”

The Truth:
In December, 1989, a rap singer named Charles Shaw informed a
New York Newsday
reporter that Morvan and Pilatus hadn’t even sung on their album. He retracted the claim a few weeks later (it turned out that he was paid $150,000 for the retraction), but Milli Vanilli’s horrible live performances fueled suspicions that they weren’t the genuine article. Finally in November, 1990, Milli Vanilli’s producer, Frank Farian, confirmed it. The pair, it turned out, had been hired because they would add sex appeal to the music videos.

Morvan and Pilatus were stripped of their Grammy and were even named in a class action suit filed by angry fans. They eventually regrouped as “Rob and Fab: The German and the French,” but the new act bombed.

THE ARCHIES

When the
Archie
comic strip became a half-hour CBS cartoon show in 1968, sales of everything connected to
Archie
characters, from lunch boxes to comic books, skyrocketed. The executives who created the show wanted to sell records, too. So, they hired Don Kirshner, the man behind the Monkees’ hits, to put together a group that would make records as the Archies. The band released an album in 1968. Their first single, “Bang Shang-A-Lang,” was a modest success, but their second single, “Sugar, Sugar”—a song the Monkees had turned down in 1967—was the biggest selling record of 1969, with total sales of over $4 million.