Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (10 page)

Everybody dies. But few people’s deaths are bizarre enough to get a mention in one of our books. So rest in peace, dearly departed, and know that your lives had great meaning—you’ve entertained a legion of bathroom readers
.

S
CHOOL’S OUT…FOREVER

For 36 years, Sharon Smith had devoted her life to teaching elementary school in Molino, Florida. On the day of her retirement in June 2008, the 57-year-old fourth-grade teacher bid a fond farewell to her final class of kids. Then, just a few minutes later, Smith had trouble breathing. She died en route to the hospital. Her retirement had lasted less than half an hour.

HEART TO HEART

Sixty-nine-year-old Sonny Graham’s 2008 death in Vidalia, GA, was thought to be just another tragic case of suicide until it was revealed that, 12 years earlier, he’d received a heart transplant from a donor who had also committed suicide. Even stranger, both men died in the same manner: a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Stranger still, Graham was married to Cheryl Cottle, the widow of the man whose heart he received. “I felt like I had known her for years,” he told a reporter in 2006. “I couldn’t keep my eyes off her.” Cottle was widowed a second time by the same sad heart.

CREAM-ATED

A French circus clown named Yves Abouchar was killed during a performance in 1995 after another clown threw a pie at his face. Abouchar choked on the foam topping.

SWAN SONG

In June 2010, rumors began circulating throughout Mexico that crooner Sergio Vega, also known as El Shaka, had been shot and killed. That’s not surprising, considering that Vega was a
Grupero,
a singer who performs
narcocorridos
—ballads about Mexican drug lords. Each drug lord has his own crooner, and they are often the victims of retribution from rival drug lords. However, the rumor of Vega’s murder was false. Vega, 40, confirmed that himself in an interview to an entertainment website. An hour later, while the news was circulating that he
hadn’t
been shot and killed, Vega was shot and killed.

Every three minutes, five Barbie dolls are sold on eBay.

HE BLEW IT

When investigators found the dead body of a 45-year-old Abner Kriller in his wrecked car, his glasses were covered by bubble gum. It seemed that Kriller blew such a big bubble that it popped all over his face. He couldn’t see and ran off the road.

NOT A PEAK EXPERIENCE

In 1993 a French mountain climber named Gerard Hommel—who’d successfully peaked Mt. Everest six times—died in his kitchen. He fell off a step ladder while changing a light bulb.

BLACK MAGIC NUMBERS

In 2001 Vladimir Grashnov, the former CEO of Mobitel, a Bulgarian mobile phone company, died of cancer at the age of 48. Two years after that, a Bulgarian mafia boss named Konstantin Dimitrov, 31, was shot and killed by an assassin. In 2005 Konstantin Dishliev, a Bulgarian real estate agent who sold drugs, was shot and killed. How are these three deaths related? Each man had been issued the same cell phone number from Mobitel. When each man died, it was assigned to the next man, who also died. (Mobitel has discontinued issuing that phone number.)

AUGUSTUS GLOOPED

In 2002 a chocolate factory worker named Yoni Cordon didn’t show up to his job in Hatfield, Pennsylvania, for three days. Then his body was found inside a 1,200-gallon vat of chocolate. No one had seen him fall in. Nor did anyone know exactly how many chocolate chips had been made and sold before he was discovered.

CHECKMATE

At a 1992 chess tournament in Moscow, Grand Chess Master Nikolai Gudkov beat a computer three times in a row. When he touched the electronic board for a fourth game, the computer electrocuted him.

Ratio of women to men in Oprah’s studio audience: 19 to 1.

PASTEUR CURED RABBIS

…and other real answers given on real tests by real students, collected by their poor, poor teachers and passed along to us
.

S
ir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper.”

“Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies and they all wrote in hydraulics.”

“The Magna Carta provided that no man should be hanged twice for the same offense.”

“The Civil War was between China and Pakistan.”

“A myth is a female moth.”

“Miguel de Cervantes wrote
Donkey Hote
.”

“The colonists won the War and no longer had to pay for taxis.”

“Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity by rubbing two cats backward and declared, ‘A horse divided against itself cannot stand.’”

“To change centimeters to meters you take out centi.”

“Lincoln’s mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands.”

“In the Olympic games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled the biscuits, and threw the java.”

“The sun never set on the British Empire because the British Empire is in the East and the sun sets in the West.”

“Louis Pasteur discovered a cure for rabbis.”

“Lincoln went to the theater and got shot in his seat by one of the actors in a moving-picture show.”

“The French Revolution was accomplished before it happened and catapulted into Napoleon.”

“Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that name.”

“Nero was a cruel tyranny who would torture his subjects by playing the fiddle to them.”

“Gravity was invented by Isaac Walton. It is chiefly noticeable in the autumn when the apples are falling off the trees.”

The German language has words to describe 30 different types of kisses.

FIGHT CLUB,
STARRING
RUSSELL CROWE

Some films are so closely associated with a specific actor or director that it’s hard to imagine they weren’t the first choices. But it happens all the time. Can you imagine, for example
…

B
EN AFFLECK & MATT DAMON AS JACK & ENNIS
(Brokeback Mountain,
2005) Gus Van Sant was the first big-name director to show interest in adapting Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story about the struggles of two cowboys who fall in love. Having previously directed real-life best friends Affleck and Damon in
Good Will Hunting,
Van Sant offered them the roles, but Damon declined (he’d just played a homosexual in
The Talented Mr. Ripley
). When Ang Lee took over the project, he offered the roles to Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg (Wahlberg declined because the gay subject matter “creeped him out”). The parts ultimately went to Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal.

MARK WAHLBERG AS DONNIE DARKO
(Donnie Darko,
2001) The first actor tapped to play the troubled teenager was Jason Schwartzman
(Rushmore),
who had to turn down the role because of scheduling conflicts. Vince Vaughn auditioned, but at 30 he was too old to play a high-school student. Mark Wahlberg was then offered the part, but reportedly told director Richard Kelly that he would only play Darko with a lisp. Kelly said no, and Wahlberg was out. The lengthy casting process came to an end as soon as Jake Gyllenhaal showed up. According to co-star and co-producer Drew Barrymore: “Jake simply
was
Donnie Darko.”

RUSSELL CROWE AS TYLER DURDEN
(Fight Club,
1999) One of the film’s producers wanted Crowe to play Durden, the character who convinces the narrator to start a club for committing terrorist acts. That decision was put on hold while they looked for a director. The first choice was Peter Jackson, a fan of the original Chuck Palahniuk novel, but he’d already begun work on
The Lord of the Rings
. Bryan Singer (The
Usual Suspects
) was sent the book but he didn’t even read it. The third choice, British director Danny Boyle
(Trainspotting),
was busy with other projects. When their fourth choice, David Fincher, finally signed on, he lobbied for Brad Pitt to play Durden. Leading the candidates to play the narrator were Matt Damon and Sean Penn. Instead, Fincher cast the lesser-known Edward Norton, impressed by his performance in
The People vs. Larry Flynt
. The female lead was offered to Renée Zellweger, but she declined due to the dark subject material. Cast instead: Helena Bonham Carter.

Buy paint! Studies show artists have more lovers than people in other career fields.

TOM CRUISE AS BENJAMIN BUTTON
(The
Curious Case of Benjamin Button,
2008) F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 short story about a man who ages in reverse spent decades in development. Jack Nicholson was the first actor considered for the role of Button, and that was back in the 1970s. Several director/actor teams subsequently signed on to the project but then opted out, including Frank Oz and Martin Short, Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise, and Ron Howard and John Travolta. Reason: The makeup effects were too difficult to do convincingly. Director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (the team behind
Being John Malkovich
) were offered a shot at it, but they also said no. Thanks to improvements in digital effects, the story finally made it to the big screen in 2008 with David Fincher directing Brad Pitt in the lead, the duo’s third film together (after
Se7en
and
Fight Club)
.

CAMERON DIAZ AS BRIDGET JONES
(Bridget Jones’s Diary,
2001) When the film adaptation of Helen Fielding’s novel was announced, many industry-watchers in the U.K. (including Fielding herself) hoped that British actresses Helena Bonham Carter or Kate Winslet would play Bridget. Winslet was busy with other movies, and Bonham Carter wasn’t interested in a romantic comedy. With those two out—and to the horror of British fans of the book—the producers picked rail-thin American Cameron Diaz to play the slightly overweight Jones. But the director, Sharon Maguire, wanted an unknown for the part. So she auditioned another American, Renée Zellweger, then best known for her roles in
Jerry Maguire
and
Nurse Betty
. “If you go with me and we get this wrong,” Zellweger told the director, “we are so busted.” The actress spent months perfecting her British accent and gained nearly 25 pounds for the role. It paid off: Zellweger was nominated for an Oscar and, perhaps more importantly, she received rave reviews in England.

What did Princess Diana and H.G. Wells have in common? Both were high-school dropouts.

STRANGE LAWSUITS

These days it seems that people will sue each other over practically anything. Here are some real-life examples of unusual legal battles
.

T
he Plaintiff:
Craig Clark Show, 49, from Portland, Oregon
The Defendants:
The Idaho State Police
The Lawsuit:
In 2009 Show was riding his motorcycle through Idaho when he was pulled over on suspicion of drunk driving. He could only watch helplessly as the cops searched through all of his stuff…including a Native American medicine bag that had been blessed by a medicine woman, who told him the bag
had
to remain closed or its powers of protection would run out. The police opened it…and Show’s life started going downhill (for one thing, he
was
charged with a DUI), so he sued the police for the destruction of the bag’s mystical properties, seeking $25,000 in damages.

The Verdict:
Perhaps there
were
protective powers in that bag—just before the court case was to begin in early 2010, Show fell seriously ill. The trial will resume after (and if) he recovers.

The Plaintiff:
Sherri Perper, 56, of Queens, New York

The Defendant:
Forum Novelties, a costume store

The Lawsuit:
Perper went to a Halloween party in 2008 wearing a clown costume that she bought from Forum Novelties. But she couldn’t quite figure out how to walk in the oversize clown shoes. At some point, she tripped and crashed to the floor. It may have seemed funny to her fellow partygoers, but Perper wasn’t laughing. In fact, she was in agony…and she blamed the shoes. According to her lawyer, she sustained “severe fracture injuries” to both of her legs. Claiming that the clown shoes were “defective and dangerous,” Perper is seeking unspecified monetary damages.

The Verdict:
Pending.

The Plaintiff:
Gabriela Nagy, of Toronto, Canada

The Defendant:
Rogers Wireless, a cellular phone company

The Lawsuit:
In 2006 Nagy set up a business phone with Rogers Wireless in her maiden name. A year later, her husband (not named in court documents) added Internet and land-line services to the account, for which he received a bill—in
his
name—that included all the calls made on
her
line. And he noticed that she’d called one particular number quite often. It turned out she was having an affair, and it was her boyfriend’s number. Result: Her husband divorced her. She also claimed she was too depressed to go to her $100,000-per-year job and was fired. Nagy is suing Rogers for $600,000 for not respecting her right to privacy.

Sexism? Bad drivers? Men are 41% likelier than women to be stopped for speeding.

The Verdict:
Pending.

The Plaintiff:
John Brandrick, 62, from Cornwall, England

The Defendant:
Royal Cornwall Hospital (RCH)

The Lawsuit:
In 2005 Brandrick went to RCH complaining of acute abdominal pain and was told he had pancreatic cancer. He was given less than a year to live. Brandrick quit his job, stopped paying his mortgage, emptied his bank account, and bought lavish gifts and expensive meals for his loved ones. A year passed. Not only was Brandrick not dead, he felt great. He returned to RCH and was told that it wasn’t cancer after all…but pancreatitis, which had cured itself. Destitute, he sued RCH for negligence, but because he couldn’t afford a lawyer, he was hoping for a settlement.