Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (12 page)

As bride-to-be Natalia Dearnley tried to get to her wedding in Rome in 2008, a movie crew filming
Angels and Demons
was blocking access to the church where the groom and guests were waiting. Dearnley was told that she would have to wait until the day’s filming was completed to get through. Hanks, the film’s star, heard about her predicament and asked director Ron Howard to stop filming. Then he escorted the starstruck bride across the road to the church. (He even held the train of her dress to keep it from getting dirty.)

DEMI MOORE

Late one night in April 2009, Moore was checking her Twitter account when she saw this post from one of her 37,000 followers: “Getting a knife, a big one that is sharp.” Then she posted another one: “gbye…gonna kill myself now.” Moore checked the profile and discovered it was an unemployed Silicon Valley woman. Moore quickly wrote to her: “Are you serious?” No response. Moore then reposted the message on her website alerting anyone in San Jose who might know this woman. Moore’s fans flooded the police department with calls; the cops located the distraught woman and took her in for psychiatric evaluation. Two days later, the woman reappeared on Moore’s Twitter page: “Going to pay it forward!!! Starting today, no more pity party!”

Profession most often portrayed by Oscar-nominated actresses: prostitute.

KEANU REEVES

In 2003 Reeves, who starred in
The Matrix
trilogy, gave away $74
million
of his salary to the “unsung heroes” of the films—the special effects crew. The 29 people who worked for years on the project received $2.5 million each. Reeves, who has also donated millions of dollars to leukemia research, downplayed the good deed: “I could live on what I’ve already made for the next few centuries.”

PAUL McCARTNEY

In 2003 a New Zealand singer named Glenn Aitken was performing at a restaurant in the hotel where McCartney happened to be staying. After the show, the former Beatle approached Aitken and told him how impressed he was with his vocals. Aitken thanked McCartney and explained that he’d been trying to get a record deal for years, to no avail. “I’ll see what I can do,” said McCartney. Not only did McCartney get a record deal for Aitken, he played bass on one of the tracks. “It was so monumentally incredible,” said Aitken, who grew up idolizing the Beatles. “I find it almost impossible to put into words.”

NIGHT OF THE DRIVING DEAD

Rescue crews in Portland, Oregon, were called to the scene of a single-car accident one summer evening in 2010. When they arrived, they were alarmed by the extent of the injuries. The victims’ faces were all bleeding; their skin was white, as if they were dead, and blood and guts were smeared all over their clothes. It was quite gruesome.

Or was it? It turned out that, when the accident happened, the five people were on their way to a costume party, all dressed and made up like zombies. Said police Sgt. Greg Stewart, “We’re glad that everyone is alive, despite being undead.”

Missing link? Humans have 46 chromosomes; potatoes have 48.

KEITH MOON,
BATHROOM BOMBER

More than 30 years after his death, the Who’s drummer, Keith Moon, is still remembered as one of the best in rock history. And as more than one hotel chain learned to their regret, that wasn’t all he was known for
.

M
Y GENERATION

In the summer of 1967, the British rock group the Who embarked on their first concert tour of the United States. They were the opening act for Herman’s Hermits, best known for their hit single “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter.” The Who had played dates in the U.S. before, including their breakthrough appearance at the Monterey International Pop Festival just a few weeks earlier that June. But this was the band’s first cross-country tour, and there still was much about America that was new and unfamiliar to them.

Take American fireworks, for example: In many Southern states, giant firecrackers much more powerful than the “penny bangers” sold in England were perfectly legal. They could be bought cheaply and in large quantities all over the South. The Hermits had discovered them on their first American tour in 1965, and now, on a swing through Alabama, they introduced Keith Moon, the Who’s 20-year-old drummer, to his first bag of American fireworks—cherry bombs.

Cherry bombs are still sold today, but in the 1960s they contained as much as 20 times the explosive power they do now—more than enough to maim or blind anyone who was holding them when they went off, or who happened to be standing too close. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission banned original-strength cherry bombs in 1966, but judging from the reign of terror on which Keith Moon was about to embark, they must have still been available.

MAGIC BUS

The Hermits’ favorite prank was throwing cherry bombs out of their tour bus, taking care to hold the lit bombs for a few seconds before tossing them so that they would explode in front of the car traveling behind theirs. Moon, with a little help from Who bassist John Entwistle, came up with his own destructive trademark when the tour pulled into Birmingham, Alabama, and the band decided that the hotel’s room service wasn’t up to snuff: He blew up his hotel-room toilet.

It took the Jivaro Indians of South America about a week to make a shrunken head.

Why did Moon single out his toilet for destruction? The original plan was to blow up the
plumbing
beneath the toilet, not the toilet itself. The idea was to do damage without the hotel finding out who was responsible, or whether anyone was actually responsible at all. For all the management would know, the pipe under the floor might have burst as a result of normal wear and tear.

AMAZING JOURNEY

Apparently toilets in the United States flush differently than they do in the U.K., because when Moon and Entwistle tossed their first lit cherry bomb into that hotel toilet in Birmingham, they expected it to flush right down the bowl and into the plumbing pipes. But it didn’t—instead, it just swirled around and around the bowl as the fuse burned lower and lower. At the last second, Moon and Entwistle fled the bathroom, slamming the door behind them just as the bomb went off, blowing the toilet to pieces. When Moon and Entwistle opened the door, all they saw was smoke, shards of porcelain, and a hole in the floor.

The destruction must have made quite an impression on Moon, because he quickly abandoned the idea of blowing up pipes he couldn’t see in favor of toilets he could, even if it meant getting caught and having to pay for the damage. “From that moment on,” biographer Tony Fletcher writes in
Moon: The Life and Death of a Rock Legend,
“no toilet in a hotel or changing room was safe until the tour moved away or Keith’s bomb supply ran out.”

I CAN’T EXPLAIN

Some toilet bombings stood out more than others: On a trip to New York in 1968, a
very
drunk Moon blew up the toilet in his room on the ninth floor of the Gorham Hotel, a popular spot with rock bands. Then he climbed out onto the window ledge, where he tossed more cherry bombs onto the police, who responded to the call of an explosion at the hotel. Thrown out of the Gorham, the Who moved to the Waldorf-Astoria, one of New York’s swankiest hotels. Then, when the management locked the Who out of their rooms until they paid their bill in advance and in cash (probably after receiving a call from the Gorham), Moon retrieved his luggage from his locked room by blowing the door off its hinges.

How to tell whether you have a cold or the flu: Colds make you sneeze; flus don’t.

Thrown out of two hotels in 24 hours, the Who tried to book rooms in a third. By then, word had gotten around to every hotel in town, though, and suddenly no rooms were available anywhere. Pete Townshend, the Who’s guitarist and songwriter, stayed with friends that night; everyone else had to sleep on the tour bus.

WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN

The Who was one of the highest-earning bands of the era, but the band was soon reduced to staying at mid-priced hotel chains like the Holiday Inn because none of the elite hotels would have them. During one trip to New York in 1971, they did manage to book rooms at the Navarro, a luxurious hotel overlooking Central Park. But that was only because the hotel was under renovation—the manager put them in rooms that hadn’t been redone yet, and let Moon demolish them to his heart’s content. (One night Moon bashed his way through a brick wall to retrieve a cassette tape from the locked room next door.)

Moon’s reign of toilet terror ended only after his untimely death in 1978 at the age of 32, when he overdosed on the prescription medication he was taking to treat his alcoholism. It’s not clear exactly how many toilets he destroyed during his 11-year love affair with cherry bombs; one estimate places the value of all that destroyed porcelain at half a million dollars.

LONG LIVE ROCK

If you watched the halftime show on Super Bowl Sunday in 2010, you know the Who are still going strong, albeit minus Moon and Entwistle, who died from a heart attack in 2002. But the band may not be around much longer: In 2010 the Who cancelled their spring touring schedule when Pete Townshend, who is partially deaf, suffered a recurrence of
tinnitus
—buzzing or ringing in the ears—brought on, no doubt, by more than 40 years of exposure to loud music…and all those exploding toilets.

Next to godliness: Ancient-Egyptian priests bathed in cold water four times daily.

LOCK AND LOAD

The origin stories of a few gun-related phrases
.

L
OCK AND LOAD

Meaning:
Get ready

Origin:
The phrase was originally “load and lock.” In the early 20th century, the standard army rifle was the 1903 Springfield. The safety on that rifle couldn’t be locked until the rifle was loaded, so it was “loaded” with a clip, the bolt was closed, and the safety was “locked,” meaning the rifle was ready for action. When the M1 Garand replaced the Springfield as standard issue in 1936, the phrase was reversed to “lock and load,” because the M1’s safety could be locked
before
loading. In any case, “lock and load” in the sense of readying a rifle for use was first made famous by John Wayne in the 1949 film
Sands of Iwo Jima
. It came to mean “get ready” sometime in the late 1980s.

JUMP THE GUN

Meaning:
To act before the appropriate time

Origin:
The origin of this phrase dates back to 1905: Athletes in running competitions who left the starting line before the starter’s pistol went off were said to have “beaten the pistol.” The phrase morphed into “jump the gun” sometime over the next 15 years because it was already being used metaphorically by 1921. The earliest known use of the phrase in a nonathletic sense appeared in
The Iowa Homestead
newspaper that year in a story that said: “Give the pigs a good start; jump the gun, so to speak, and get them on a grain ration before weaning time.” It’s been used that way ever since.

RIDE SHOTGUN

Meaning:
To sit in the front passenger seat of a car

Origin:
In the 1939 film
Stagecoach,
Curly (George Bancroft) says to Ringo Kid (John Wayne), “I’m gonna ride shotgun,” and proceeds to sit next to a stagecoach driver with a shotgun in his hand. The film was an enormous success and began the Western film (and later television) craze that gripped America for decades. People therefore assumed it was used back in the 1800s, but there’s no evidence for that: The earliest known reference to the phrase appeared in 1919 in Utah’s
Ogden Examiner
—long after the end of the stagecoach era—about a parade in which a prominent local citizen would “ride shotgun” in an antique stagecoach. It appeared only occasionally until the film made it popular.

A 2-inch square of Velcro is strong enough to suspend a 175-lb. person from a wall.

LOCK, STOCK, AND BARREL

Meaning:
The entire thing

Origin:
The lock, the stock, and the barrel are the three main components of a musket, the longarm commonly used by armies until the late 1800s. The
lock
is the firing mechanism that “locks” into position and is released by pulling the trigger. The
stock
is the section to which the lock and barrel are attached and which is rested against the shoulder when firing. The
barrel
is the metal cylinder down which the musket ball travels. So if you had the lock, stock, and barrel of a musket—you had an entire musket. The phrase was in use in the way we know it today by the mid-1700s. But the earliest written reference comes from a Connecticut newspaper account of a July 4th celebration: A group of revelers with a “huge keg of rum” made several toasts, one of which was to “Patriotism—Self interest, the cock, lock, stock and barrel.” (The “cock” is the hammer, a part of the lock.)