Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (28 page)

250 people have fallen off the Leaning Tower of Pisa since it was built in 1372.

THE LEANING TOWER OF SUURHUSEN

The steeple of a medieval church in northwestern Germany, this 90-foot brick tower was built in 1450 on a foundation of oak tree trunks sunken into waterlogged marshland. That may not sound like a stable foundation, but the logs supported the tower and kept it more or less vertical for 400 years. Then in the 1800s, the marsh was drained and the logs were exposed to the air for the first time. Result: The logs rotted…and the steeple was soon the most-leaning tower on Earth, with a slant of more than 5.19 degrees off of vertical (the same as this page), creating an overhang of eight feet from the top of the tower to the base.

THE LEANING TOWER OF ABU DHABI

Who says leaning towers have to be accidental? The twisting, S-shaped Capital Gate tower in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, was deliberately designed to lean a whopping 18 degrees to the west (177 feet out of line from the top of the building to the base), or more than three times the lean of the former world record holder, the Leaning Tower of Suurhusen. (Guinness World Records has since reclassified Suurhusen as the World’s Most Unintentionally Tilted Building.) Slated for completion in late 2010, the 35-story building will contain a Hyatt hotel, 14 floors of office space, a 19th floor “outdoor” pool, and a tea lounge that hangs off the side of the leaning building more than 260 feet off the ground.

IF THE NAME FITS

After rock singer Jani Lane failed to show up to a March 2010 court appearance for a DUI case, the judge put out a warrant for his arrest. Lane is the lead singer of the hard rock band Warrant.

Henry Ford’s first car was called the Quadricycle. It was made from bicycle parts.

DO DO THAT VOODOO!

And now the lowdown on the religion that brought you zombies
.

W
HAT IS VOODOO?

• It’s an
animist
religion—the idea that living souls exist in all plants, objects, and natural phenomena—based on ancestor worship. In Voodoo, there is one Supreme Being and thousands of spirits, called
Loa
. Voodoo rituals center around the practitioners’ relationship with the spirit world.

• The word “voodoo” comes from the West African word
vodou,
which means “invisible force.”

• Haitian Voodoo is a combination of religious traditions from West Africa and the Caribbean, and Roman Catholicism.

• There are two kinds of Voodoo:
Rado
works for good;
Petro
goes to the Dark Side.

WHO DO VOODOO?

• 60 million people, mostly from the Caribbean, Brazil and Africa.

• A priest is a
houngan;
a priestess a
mambo;
a student a
hounsis
.

• Voodoo followers carry white charms called
juju
and black charms called
mojo. Gris-gris
are the most powerful and the most expensive. They are small leather bags filled with herbs, potions, hair and animal skin.

HOW DO YOU DO VOODOO?

• An altar is laden with candles, money, food, rum, sacred stones, saints’ cards, bells, and knives. The ritual begins with the drawing of a
veve
(symbol for a specific spirit) on the floor in corn meal. Drumming and dancing begins. The dancing continues until someone is possessed by the spirit and falls. The possessed dancer is now the Loa who sees the future, gives blessings and grants wishes. Warning: anyone who touches this Loa could die.

WOO-WOO VOODOO

• According to anthropologists, Voodoo priests
do
cast spells and occasionally stick pins in Voodoo dolls. (
Pinstruck.com
is a website that allows you to send digital voodoo curses anonymously.)

Will their prayers be answered? A Florida church and T-Mobile have applied to build a 130-foot-high cross that’s also a cell phone tower.

ART THAT POOPS

Here at the Bathroom Readers’ Institute, we’re always on the lookout for art that’s “bathroom-themed.” Here’s one of the strangest items in that category that we’ve ever come across
.

D
OWN THE HATCH

Wim Delvoye, 44, is a “neo-conceptual” artist from Belgium. He’s considered the
enfant terrible
of the Belgian art world, and in the fall of 2000 he lived up to expectations when he unveiled
Cloaca,
an art piece that has been described as “a room-sized intestine” and “the world’s first free-standing, man-made digestive system.” It’s a machine that converts food into a substance approximating human waste.

If you’ve ever seen the original
Cloaca
or any of a number of updated versions that have made the rounds of modern-art museums, you know that the machines don’t look all that impressive. They’re just a series of six glass vats sitting on steel carts, connected to each other by plastic tubing, with an in-sink garbage disposal, meat grinder, pumps, and a few other pieces of hardware. But they’re far more sophisticated than they appear: Delvoye, assisted by a team of plumbers, gastroenterologists, computer scientists, mechanical engineers and other specialists, spent years developing the idea. The glass vats are filled with enzymes, bacteria, acids, and other chemicals that mimic the human digestive process, from the mouth to the stomach and all the way through the small and large intestines. The vats are kept at a constant 98.6° F—just as if they were inside the human body. Delvoye controls the entire system remotely from the computer in his art studio.

MEALTIME

Watching a
Cloaca
being fed is a big part of the fun. Delvoye arranges for the finest restaurants in the area to prepare special meals for his machines, and then posts a menu next to the installation so that the public always knows what
Cloaca
is eating.

On January 24, 2002, for example, when a
Cloaca
was exhibited at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City, the machine dined on seared monkfish
with herbs, sauteed in beer butter, with a side of baby vegetables and shrimp, plus browned French fries slathered in mayonnaise (that’s how they eat fries in Belgium).

The meal, prepared and served by chef Chris Gielen of a trendy Belgian basserie called Markt, was cut into bite-size pieces and “fed” into the clear glass sink with garbage disposal that serves as
Cloaca’s
mouth. Fish, veggies, fries, and all were washed down with a bottle of Belgian beer.
(Cloaca’s
system cannot tolerate raw vegetables, spicy foods, or meat with bones. Other than that, the chefs are free to prepare any dishes they like and serve them with beer, wine, cocktails, soft drinks, water, or any other beverage that pairs well with the meal.)

It takes as little as five minutes to feed
Cloaca,
but the machine needs 22 hours to fully digest each meal. People don’t need to completely digest one meal before they eat another one, and neither does
Cloaca
. It eats twice a day—breakfast and a late lunch in some museums, lunch and dinner in others—and it eats every day, even if the museum is closed. It’s easy to tell when
Cloaca
is hungry: A blue light flashes when it’s ready to eat.

IN ONE END…

After
Cloaca
’s garbage disposal “chews” the food, it’s fed into a meat grinder for further processing, and then pumped through the six glass vats, each of which simulates a different stage of the digestive process. In most
Cloaca
models the food will travel about 33 feet—from one end of the machine to the other—in the 22 hours it takes for the meal to be digested. That distance is a pretty close approximation of the human digestive system, which if stretched end-to-end would be about 30 feet long.

Every 24 hours,
Cloaca
pumps—or poops—the remains of its most recent meals onto a rotating circular tray that could probably be referred to as the machine’s toilet. What happens next depends on where the machine is being exhibited. When the first machine was unveiled in Antwerp in 2000, the Cloaca-doo was carefully collected and entombed in resin-filled glass flasks, which were then sold with a copy of the corresponding menu for as much as $1,000 apiece (there were plenty of takers, even at that price). In SoHo, workers just scooped up the waste and flushed it down a (real) toilet.

So make tea? The leaves of the coffee plant contain more caffeine than the beans.

CLOAC-U-LENCE

It’s not easy building a machine that mimics the human digestive tract, and Delvoye’s machines have had humanlike problems along the way, including constipation and diarrhea. After the first
Cloaca
was unveiled in Antwerp’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2000, it developed flatulence so severe that the museum staff went on strike until the management piped the fumes out of the building. By the time
Cloaca
arrived in SoHo, the flatulence problem had largely been solved, and the three-month visit went off without a hitch as
Cloaca
ate and excreted 188 meals without causing any visitors to lose their appetite, at least not from the smell.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Even so,
Cloaca
did manage to generate criticism during its stay in New York, and from a surprising source: the gourmet chefs who prepared its meals. Many came to see
Cloaca
as a tremendous missed opportunity to raise issues about contemporary eating habits, nutrition, and health. “When I heard Delvoye speak, it was odd to me, because he didn’t ask questions that make us think about culture and diet,” Peter Hoffman, owner/chef of Savoy restaurant, complained to
The New York Times
in 2002. “Like, if I throw in greasy food versus more healthy food, what happens? Do various diets make any difference? Does it need 2,200 calories a day, and how would it deal with 3,800?”

Delvoye says that the pointlessness of the machine
is
the point. He’s a
conceptual
artist, after all, and the concept he’s trying to get across has nothing to do with nutrition or food. Delvoye believes all modern life is pointless, as is all art;
that’s
the point he’s trying to get across. His original goal was to build the most pointless machine he could think of, and he came up with
Cloaca:
a machine that turns the finest cuisine a city has to offer into crap without benefiting anyone or anything. “I like the beauty of it doing all this work for nothing,” he says.

Pointless, but not unappealing, as proven by the huge crowds who pile into modern art museums in Antwerp, Vienna, Zurich, Toronto, New York, and anyplace else where
Cloaca
is exhibited, just to watch it eat and excrete. “I think
Cloaca
is a machine that can be understood by any culture,” Delvoye says. “It’s a machine that poos. That’s very universal.”

The word most often misspelled in search engines: resturant…no, restauraunt…er, restaurant.

OL’ JAYBEARD
AND BRIAN

Ol’ Jaybeard likes to burst into the BRI and interrupt Brian with his strange challenges and weird word puzzles. Now we pass them on to you. Good luck! (Answers are on
page 535
.)

1
Ol’ Jaybeard held up a
Bathroom Reader
and said, “I’ll bet you I can place this book on the floor and none of you will be able to jump over it.” Brian replied, “I’ll take your bet, but you’re not allowed to put the book underneath anything like a desk or a chair.” Jay agreed to the terms. He placed the book on the floor—not under anything—and still won the bet. How?

2
.
Ol’ Jaybeard said to Brian: “Tell me what these words have in common: hijack, coughing, astute, worst, and define.” Perplexed, Brian asked for a hint. “No hints!” replied Ol’ Jaybeard. “I
order
you to figure it out yourself!”

3
.
“Brian,” said Ol’ Jaybeard, “if you can tell me how much change is in my pocket, you can have it. All but three of the coins are quarters. All but three are dimes. All but three are nickels. All but three are pennies.” How much money was in his pocket?

4
.
Ol’ Jaybeard challenged Brian with a question: “What common abbreviation has three times as many syllables as an abbreviation than it does when you say the full words?” Stumped, Brian decided to look it up, which prompted Ol’ Jaybeard to say, “Don’t cheat and use the Google or whatever it is you kids are calling it these days!” Brian replied, “Thanks for the hint—I know the answer!”