Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (42 page)

TWO REAL COMBINATION BUSINESSES

• Aves Taxidermy & Cheese (Wisconsin)

• Dentist & Thai Restaurant (Australia)

Most boxes of cookies sold by a Girl Scout: 17,328, by Jennifer Sharpe, age 15 (2008).

MISSING LINKS
WORD GAME

BRI members Jack Mingo and Erin Barrett invented this game. Here’s how you play: Each group of words below has a “missing link”—a word that can be added to the beginning or end of each word to form a familiar phrase. For example, if we listed “roll, splitter, Lincoln, captain’s, cabin, yule,” the answer would be “log.” Bonus: The answers from 1 through 7 make another “missing link” puzzle. Get the idea? Now try these. (The answers are on
page 536
.)

P
UZZLE #1
1
.
Summer, Vacation, Rainy, Sun, Work, End, of Our Lives

2
.
Shooting, Fish, Power, North, Dark, Dwarf, Movie, Crossed

3
.
Down, Over, Low, DMC, Home, Bank, in My Stocking, Marathon

4
.
Potato, Pepper, Red, Chocolate, Seat, Box, Not so, Flash

5
.
Big, Band, Gingerbread, Cat, Keeping, Hold, Playing, Maxwell

6
.
Ring, Wig, Canal, Plug, Corn, Inner, Rabbit

7
.
Level, Bass, Black, Red, Dead, Slug, Salt

PUZZLE #2

1
.
Steam, Dixie, Pea, Dog, Slide, Train, Blower, Police, Penny

2
.
Here, Post, Off, Danger, In, Open, Up, Zodiac

3
.
Arm, Coal, Bull, Boss, Orchestra, Viper, Peach, Barbecue

4
.
Caught, Fall, Order, Supply, Sell, Circuit, Cake, Hand, Wave

5
.
Wave, Moon, Year, Fire, Head, Weight, Bulb

6
.
Ear, Hurried, Law, Product, Myself, Stand, Appointment, Golly

7
.
Leader, Job, Profit, Appetite, Prevention, Hair, Incalculable, Weight

Including the attic, there were 11 rooms in the
Brady Bunch’s
TV house.

I STINK, THEREFORE I AM

Thank goodness you only have to read these stories of horrible odors instead of experiencing them first hand. (Of course, if you’re in the bathroom right now…)

O
H, DEER
The unfortunate neighbors of Randy Good in North Buffalo Township, Pennsylvania, complained to authorities in late 2008 about a smell coming from Good’s yard. “You can barely go outside,” said neighbor Dallas Bryan. “The last couple days, it’s been so bad you can’t even stay
inside
.” Cause of the smell: hundreds of deer carcasses piled up in Good’s yard. Good has a contract with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation to remove dead deer from roads in five counties—and he picks up 50 to 100 a day. Normally he takes them to a landfill, but one of his trucks had recently broken down, and the landfill was closed on the weekend, so Good just started dumping the excess carcasses in his yard. After numerous complaints and the intervention of a local congressional representative, embarrassed state officials finally sent in DOT workers, who hauled all the dead deer away.

EAU DE DUMP

In 2010 the Chinese government announced that they had figured out how to deal with the stench emanating from the enormous, overflowing landfills around the city of Beijing: They installed 100 high-pressure “deodorant cannons” at one site and plan to install more at other sites in the future. The cannons can shoot fragrance sprays up to 170 feet. So instead of the unpleasant odor of rotting garbage, residents will now smell the unpleasant odor of rotting garbage…mixed with the sweet fragrance of industrial deodorant.

THAT NEW DRUG SMELL

In March 2010, police were called to investigate a strange odor in a Fairview, New Jersey, neighborhood. They were able to trace it to one house where four men were using lighter fluid to burn the labels off of prescription medication bottles. And they were trying to mask the odor it created by boiling water with cinnamon in it. Police discovered almost 15,000 pill bottles of several different kinds of medication, mostly painkillers, and more than $5 million worth of pills. The four men were arrested.

At 72 years of age Alexander Graham Bell set a world water-speed record of over 70 mph.

WALFART

A 51-year-old Seattle-area man was questioned by police after they were called to a Walmart in South Kitsap, Washington, in early 2010. The man had been seen dumping vials of liquid on the floor, and the liquid smelled.
Bad
. The store had to be evacuated, and several people reported getting severe headaches immediately after taking a whiff of the foul substance. The man initially told police that he was shopping in the store with his girlfriend, but later admitted that he’d dumped the liquid—which he called “stink bombs”—and that he had also dispersed the contents of a can called “Super Fart Spray” in the store. He said he thought it would be funny. The man wasn’t arrested, but he is banned from Walmart for life.

THE WORLD’S MOST VALUABLE VIDEO GAME

Stadium Events
was a track-and-field game released by Bandai in 1987 to go with its Family Fun Fitness Mat, a soft vinyl mat. When you hooked it up to the Nintendo console, it allowed you to control characters by walking and jumping. In 1988 Nintendo bought the rights to the Family Fun Fitness Mat and rebranded it as the Power Pad. Then it changed the name of
Stadium Events
to
World Class Track Meet
and recalled and destroyed all unsold
Stadium Events
. But 200 had already been sold, of which only 10 to 20 are believed to exist today.

• In 2010 a North Carolina woman found her kids’ old Nintendo games in her garage and put them up for sale on eBay…including
Stadium Events
. Expecting two or three bucks for each game, she got $13,105 for
Stadium Events
.

• A Kansas man heard about the rare game and found a sealed copy he was about to donate to Goodwill. (It was sealed because he’d bought the game in 1987 but never found a fitness mat to make it work.) He sold it on eBay for $41,300.

Six U.S. presidents were professional soldiers: Washington, Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Taylor, Grant, and Eisenhower.

HUH?

Sometimes you read a news story and you can only say, “Huh?
”

N
EWS ITEM:
Two doctors at Cape Fear Valley Medical Center in Fayetteville, North Carolina, induced labor on a woman in November 2008 when she was having difficulty giving birth. When the baby still didn’t come, they performed a caesarean section on her.

HUH?
They performed the caesarean…but found no baby. It turns out the woman wasn’t pregnant. After a yearlong review of the case, the North Carolina Medical Board determined that the woman was actually experiencing
pseudocyesis,
or “false pregnancy,” a real ailment, but one more common in dogs and mice than in humans. The doctors were issued “letters of concern.”

NEWS ITEM:
In March 2010, Joan Higgins, 66, owner of Majors Pet Shop in Sale, England, was fined £1,000 ($1,506) and ordered to wear a tracking device on her ankle for two months for the unlawful sale of an animal.

HUH?
The unlawful sale for which Ms. Higgins was being punished: She sold a goldfish to a 14-year-old boy. (An animal welfare law passed in the U.K. in 2006 makes it illegal to sell pets to anyone under the age of 16.) Ms. Higgins was also given a curfew—she had to be inside her house from 7:00 p.m. until 7:00 a.m. every day for seven weeks. And the boy who bought the fish? He’d been sent into the store as part of a police undercover investigation of pet-shop sales.

NEWS ITEM:
A 32-year-old Croatian soccer player was penalized for taking a dive—meaning he faked being knocked down by an opposing player—during a match in May 2010. Goran Tunjic had fallen to the ground and was approached by a referee with a yellow card, which signifies that a player has been penalized.

HUH?
Tunjic hadn’t taken a dive—he was dead. Tragically, he’d suffered a heart attack during play. Medical attendants immediately attempted to revive him, but it was no use. “Doctors tried to help him but there was nothing they could do,” a league spokesman said. “He just fell dead on the spot.”

NEWS ITEM:
In April 2010, Robert K. Cheruiyot, 21, of Kenya won the 114th Boston Marathon, shattering the course record with a time of 2 hours, 5 minutes, and 52 seconds.

HUH?
The previous course record was held by four-time winner…Robert K. Cheruiyot.
That
Robert K. Cheruiyot is also from Kenya. He’s not related to the Robert K. Cheruiyot who won in 2010—the two record-breaking Boston Marathon runners just happen to have the same name.

NEWS ITEM:
In 1990, 18-year-old Kendall Gibson was convicted of robbery, abduction, and gun charges and sentenced to 47 years in the Greensville Correctional Center in Virginia. And for more than 10 years he’s been in a 8-by-10-foot isolation cell reserved for the most violent prisoners. He spends 23 hours a day in the tiny cell and gets to spend one hour per day outside.

HUH?
Gibson hasn’t spent a decade in isolation because he’s violent—he’s there because he refuses to cut his hair. And it’s for religious reasons. Gibson is a Rastafarian; he wears the religion’s trademark long dreadlocks. But according to a prison rule implemented in 1999, Gibson’s refusal to trim them means he has to live in isolation. At least 40 other prisoners were so confined when the law went into effect. Nobody knows how many there are today—prison officials refuse to divulge that information.

NEWS ITEM:
In March 2010, a security guard walking around a parking lot in Ilford, East London, England, when he saw a chicken drumstick on the ground. He kicked it around for a while. Then he noticed that the “drumstick” had an unusual feature.

HUH?
The unusual feature was a nail—and the drumstick wasn’t a drumstick—it was a human thumb. Even weirder, a surveillance video showed that it had fallen from the sky. Tests determined that the thumb belonged to kebab shop worker Mahmood Ahmad, 41, who had disappeared three days earlier. Several people were arrested in connection with the case over the following months, but the rest of Mr. Ahmad still hasn’t been found. Just how his thumb came to be removed from his hand, not to mention how it fell from the sky, has not yet been explained.

In 2006 the Hell’s Angels sued Disney for using their logo in the movie
Wild Hogs
.

SUPER BOWL I

The Super Bowl is more than just a football game—it’s a cultural event with weeks of advance media coverage, a full day of TV programming, and a third of America tuned in. Even the commercials are considered news. But the first Super Bowl in 1967 was a lot different
.

•
NAME:
The first Super Bowl wasn’t called Super Bowl I. Officially, it was the “1967 AFL-NFL World Championship Game.” The two major leagues, the American Football League and the National Football League, had merged in 1966, and this was the first interleague title game.

•
PLACE:
Today, the location of the game is announced two or three years in advance so the city can prepare stadium renovations and make sure there are enough facilities, primarily hotel rooms. The location of the 1967 game—the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum—was decided on by the league about six weeks before the big game.

•
DATE:
Nowadays, the game date is known well in advance—it’s always the first Sunday in February, by decree of the NFL and TV broadcasters. But the date for the 1967 game wasn’t locked down until December 1966, when the league decided to delay the final AFL playoff game (set for December 26) and the NFL playoff (set for January 1) in order to present them back to back on the same day—January 8, 1967—in an unprecedented TV doubleheader (standard practice today). The championship would then take place the following week on January 15, 1967.