Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (15 page)

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IN HIS FATHER’S FOOTSTEPS

Thomas Park was only a boy when his father, Mungo Park, disappeared. Young Thomas refused to accept that his father was dead, believing instead that he must have been taken prisoner. In 1827 he led a rescue expedition from the coast of Guinea. He had traveled only a few days inland when he came down with a fever and died. As for Mungo Park, no trace of him—clothing, personal effects, skeletal remains—was ever found.

COCONUCTOPUS

A strange defense mechanism of the octopus is to wrap six of its legs around its body so it resembles a coconut. Then it uses its other two legs to slowly walk backward, out of danger.

More than 50% of the world’s population owns a mobile phone.

GOVERN-MENTAL

Politicians do the strangest things
.

S
ENDING A MESSAGE—GODFATHER STYLE

Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell was trying to convince lawmakers in 2010 to vote for his proposed natural gas extraction tax. When Rep. Tim Solobay, a fellow Democrat, said he was against the tax, Rendell purchased a Tim Solobay bobble-head doll, removed the head, placed it inside a small box along with a note that urged Solobay’s support, and sent it to the Representative’s office. Solobay got the message—and the joke—and promised to reconsider his position. He also said the gesture was a “big hit” among Democrats. Pennsylvania Republicans, however, were less amused. A spokesman for House Minority Leader Rep. Sam Smith said, “Personally I don’t see the humor in sending any sort of head to anyone. I think it is kind of sickening.”

BUT NOT A DROP TO DRINK

In 2003 officials in Hudson, New York, were ordered by the Americans with Disabilities Act to install handicapped-accessible water fountains in the county courthouse. Five years later, they finally got around to installing just one of the fountains…the one on the second floor. And there’s no elevator in the building. County Public Works Commissioner David Robinson defended the inaccessible handicap-accessible water fountain, saying it’s easier for people who have trouble bending (which makes no sense—the new water fountain is actually several inches
shorter
than the one on the first floor). Robinson pledged that there are “definite plans in the future” to install one of the new fountains on the ground floor.

EXOPOLITICS

In 2010 Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the governor of the Russian region of Kalmykia, recounted this story on a Russian TV show: One day in 1997, he was reading a book at his Moscow apartment when a transparent tube appeared on his balcony. “Then I felt that someone was calling me.” The next thing he knew, Ilyumzhinov was taking a tour of an alien spaceship. The aliens spoke to him telepathically, he said, and they passed along a warning: “The day will come when they land on our planet and say: ‘You have behaved poorly. Why do you wage wars? Why do you destroy each other?’ Then they will pack us all into their spaceships and take us away from this place.” Most people just chalked the story up as an amusing antic by the eccentric millionaire businessman. However, Andrei Lebedev, a member of Russia’s parliament, didn’t think it was a joke. He immediately requested that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev interrogate the governor to ensure that he didn’t give the aliens any state secrets. (Results of the interrogation are unknown.)

50 light years from Earth, there is a 2,600-mile-long asteroid made of diamond.

TEXAS BANS MARRIAGE

In 2005 Texas lawmakers passed a Constitutional amendment intended to outlaw gay marriage. In 2009 Texas Attorney General Barbara Ann Radnofsky pointed out a huge flaw in a 22-word phrase in Subsection B of the amendment, which reads: “This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.” Basically, said Radnofsky, one thing that’s identical to marriage is marriage itself, so in effect, no two people of any gender are legally allowed to be married in Texas. “You don’t have to have a fancy law degree to read this and understand what it plainly says,” she said. Currently, there are no plans to correct the phrasing, but it does call into question whether any marriages that took place in Texas since 2005 are legal.

NICE LEGS…NOT!

Colin Hall, Lord Mayor of Leicester, England, was on a diet. He also wasn’t wearing a belt. Those two factors made for an embarrassing predicament one morning in June 2010 when Hall was speaking to dozens of schoolchildren at a local library. After he was done thanking them, he stood up from his chair. His pants, however, did not. They fell down to his ankles, leaving his underpants exposed to the kids, who all laughed. After being ridiculed in the press, the portly mayor apologized, but also said that it was a great way to publicize his new diet. As a show of support, Labour MP Keith Vaz presented Lord Mayor Hall with a brand-new belt.

Odds that you will drown in a bathtub: 1 in 11,469. (In a shower: almost zero.)

NASCAR-TASTROPHIES

The Allison family has been burning rubber on the NASCAR circuit since 1965—and were involved in three of the most infamous scrape-ups in the sport’s checkered past
.

R
ACE TO THE FINISH LINE

The first complete NASCAR race ever shown live on television was the 1979 Daytona 500, the circuit’s biggest annual event. Millions watched at home as star drivers Donnie Allison and Cale Yarborough headed into the final lap, neck and neck in an extremely close race. The winner, whoever it turned out to be, would probably win by a nose—if that. The lead changed between Yarborough and Allison so slightly and so often that it was just a matter of who happened to be in front when they got to the finish line. The winner? Neither. Yarborough and Allison drove so close to each other that just before the final curve, as they gunned their engines for a final push, both drivers lost control of their cars, collided, and careened into the infield. A third driver, Bobby Allison—out of contention for the win, and also Donnie Allison’s brother—saw the wreckage ahead and pulled over to see if his brother was okay. (He was.) Blame it on the stress of the race or blame it on the spirit of competition, but within minutes, all three drivers were out of their cars and screaming at each other on the open raceway. Then tensions really boiled over and the screaming escalated into a two-against-one, Allisons vs. Yarborough fistfight. And as those three punched and shoved each other, another driver, Richard Petty, zoomed past the melee…and cruised across the finish line to win the race.

SEARCH AND DESTROY

Curtis “Pops” Turner was racing in the 1966 Myers Brothers Memorial, his first major event since returning to NASCAR after the league lifted a lifetime ban on him for starting a drivers’ union. Turner began in fourth place, just behind Bobby Allison. On the seventh lap, Turner attempted to tightly pass Allison, but instead crashed into him and spun him out. Allison dropped a lap behind Turner. But about 100 laps later, Allison finally caught up to him and was ready for vengeance. Allison smashed into Turner’s bumper, then drove up alongside and bumped him again, which caused Turner to spin out. Turner then made a quick pit stop and returned to on the track, but took it slow until Allison came back around, planning to ambush him. It didn’t work—Allison knew what was coming and smashed into Turner first, pinning him against a wall. Then Turner rammed Allison, and Allison rammed Turner. And so it went…for 10 full laps in what amounted to a demolition derby. It only ended when the smashed cars, dropping parts and debris onto the track in their wake, were so damaged that their engines finally sputtered out.

If your cat is short-haired, its ancestors came from Egypt. Long-haired: from India.

LAUNCH TIME

In the 1987 Winston 500, held at the Talladega racetrack in Alabama, Bobby Allison managed to get his car up to more than 200 mph, a difficult task even for world-class, high-tech racecars. Bad move. One of Allison’s tires burst and ripped apart. The car (a Buick LeSabre) spun backward and then
launched into the air
. It flew about 20 feet and landed on top of the fence that separated the track from the fans. And it didn’t stop there: Allison’s car kept going, tearing through the protective netting as it went, for more than 150 yards. Amazingly, the car never veered into the stands, and Allison was unhurt. Flying debris, however, did hit one woman who lost her eye as a result.

Postscript:
After that nearly catastrophic wreck, NASCAR decided that its racecars were
too
fast. The league then required all cars racing at superspeedways Talladega and Daytona (the fastest and most dangerous tracks) to be fitted with
restrictor plates,
which reduce the flow of air and fuel into the carburetor, making it difficult for a car to go over 200 mph…or fly.

DADDY I$$UES

Famous investor Warren Buffett’s largest-ever purchase was a $26 billion acquisition of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad in 2010. Why’d he buy it? “Because my father didn’t buy me a train set as a kid,” said Buffett.

Water on the brain? 25% of the bottled water purchased in America is just filtered tap water.

WHAT IT COST IN 1980

In 1980 we were coming out of a gas crisis and a recession…just like today
.

• A Commodore VIC-20 computer cost $299.95. It boasted a maximum of 5 KB of memory and didn’t include a monitor.

• Ticket for a Los Angeles Dodgers game featuring Mexican rookie pitching sensation (and future MVP) Fernando Valenzuela: $4.50.

• Cost of one of the year’s most popular novels, Stephen King’s
Firestarter:
$13.95

• A 1980 Chrysler Cordoba, memorably advertised by Ricardo Montalban as being upholstered in “rich Corinthian leather,” cost $6,745.

• The price of a pack of cigarettes (people still smoked in 1980): about $1.00.

• A ticket to see
The Empire Strikes Back
cost $2.75.

• A gallon of leaded gasoline, which is now banned but was still available then, cost about $1.20.

• In 1980 a new house cost, on average, just under $69,000. Barbie’s Dream House cost around $100.

• This year, McDonald’s expanded its menu with the first fast food chicken sandwich, the McChicken (deep fried boneless patty on a bun). Price: 80 cents.

• The Sears Catalog offered a UHF- and VHF-enabled 19-inch “big-screen” color TV with a hot feature—a wood-paneled remote control with four buttons—for just $485.

• Irene Cara’s title song from the movie
Fame
won an Oscar for Best Original Song. The soundtrack LP cost about $6.

• New in the candy aisle: Big League Chew, shredded bubble gum invented by a former minor-league pitcher as a chewing-tobacco substitute. A package cost 25 cents.

• A state-of-the-art VHS machine—on which you could watch pre-recorded movies at home!—cost $699. Renting one of the few dozen titles Hollywood had released cost about $8 at one of the many new “video stores” around the country, some of which required membership fees or deposits of up to $50.