Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (47 page)

A:
Sam and Janet.

Q:
Sam and Janet who?

A:
Sam and Janet evening…

A:
Somber.

Q:
Somber who?

A:
Somber over the

rainbow.

A:
Cat gut.

Q:
Cat gut who?

A:
Cat gut your tongue?

A:
Hair comb.

Q:
Hair comb who?

A:
Hair comb trouble.

A:
Amish.

Q:
Amish who?

A:
Amish you when you go away!

A:
H.

Q:
H who?

A:
Gesundheit!

A:
Control freak. (Okay, now you say “Control freak who?”)

A:
Police.

Q:
Police who?

A:
Police stop telling me these awful knock-knock jokes!

Average SAT score: 1,520 out of a possible 2,400 points.

JOE STALIN VS.
JOHN WAYNE

After World War II, the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a “cold” war: an ideological conflict that was waged through political rhetoric, military posturing, espionage, and an arms race. Would it lead to WWIII? It didn’t, but at the time people weren’t so sure. Here’s an incredible story from that era
.

T
HE PEACE CONFERENCE
In the late 1940s, Joseph Stalin, dictator of the Soviet Union, ordered a prominent Russian film director named Sergei Gerasimov to go to New York to attend a left-wing gathering called the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace.

Gerasimov dutifully attended the conference, and that’s pretty much all there was to the story for the next 50 years. Then in 2003, British film critic Michael Munn wrote a book entitled
John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth,
in which he tells a more sinister tale of Gerasimov’s trip to the United States and its aftermath. Munn says he got the story from actor/director Orson Welles, who heard it through contacts in the Soviet film industry.

MARKED MAN

According to Munn, while Gerasimov was in New York he learned of the leadership role that John Wayne, one of America’s biggest movie stars, was playing in driving communists out of Hollywood. Wayne was the president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a right-wing group dedicated to compiling a “blacklist” of communists working in the film industry. That blacklist was used to destroy the careers of hundreds of actors, screenwriters, and directors, either because of alleged communist sympathies or simply because they refused to testify before Congressional investigating committees.

When Gerasimov returned home and reported the havoc that Wayne was wreaking on communist efforts to infiltrate the film industry, Munn’s story goes, Stalin became so angry that he dispatched a team of KGB hit men to California. Their orders: Kill John Wayne.

Every hour the world’s human population grows by 9,000…and 3 species go extinct.

BACKLOT JUSTICE

The KGB killers really did come to California, Munn writes, and they even made it onto the Warner Brothers lot, where “Duke” Wayne had an office. Disguised as FBI agents, they checked in at the front gate and were given directions to Wayne’s office. (This part of the story, says Munn, was told to him by Yakima Canutt, a Hollywood stuntman and one of Wayne’s closest friends.)

Luckily for the Duke, FBI informants had already learned of the plot. As the fake FBI agents made their way across the studio lot,
real
FBI agents hid in the back room of Wayne’s office while he and a screenwriter named James Grant sat in the front room, pretending to be working. When the hit men entered, the FBI agents pounced, disarming and handcuffing the killers before they could harm Wayne.

Those G-men must have been
big
John Wayne fans, because they let him deal with the killers his own way: At Wayne’s direction, the FBI men loaded the KGB agents into cars and drove them to a secluded beach north of Los Angeles. At the beach the KGB men, still handcuffed, were marched down to the surf and made to kneel in the wet sand. Then, as the FBI agents looked on approvingly, Wayne and Grant drew pistols and aimed them at the heads of the KGB men. “On the count of three,” Wayne told Grant. “One…two…THREE!”

HOLLYWOOD ENDING

Both Wayne and Grant fired their guns, but the KGB men didn’t die. It took a moment for them to realize they were still alive; when they opened their eyes, Wayne held up his gun and exclaimed, “Blanks!” The Duke had never killed a man (except in the movies), and he wasn’t about to start now. “I just wanted to scare the living s*** out of them,” Munn says Wayne told him.

The KGB men’s lives were spared, but probably not for long, and they knew it: If the FBI deported them back to the U.S.S.R., Stalin would surely have them executed. The KGB men decided to defect to United States right then and there, and tell the FBI everything they knew. “Welcome to the land of the free,” Wayne told them. Then he and Grant got into their car and drove off.

In one study, spiders given marijuana started to spin webs but quit halfway through.

Wayne was safe, but would the commies try again? To guard against future attempts on Wayne’s life, Yakima Canutt and his stuntmen friends organized themselves into a private intelligence-gathering force for Wayne and began infiltrating communist cells operating in southern California. On the basis of the information they gathered, Munn writes, the stuntmen were able to break up at least two more attempts on Wayne’s life, the first one in the summer of 1953, while Wayne was in Mexico filming
Hondo
. They thwarted a second attempt in 1955 by storming the communists’ hideout in the back room of a Burbank printing company and beating them to a bloody pulp.

Those would-be assassins didn’t fare as well as the two that Wayne and Grant “killed” on the beach after the first attempt, Munn writes: The stuntmen bought them tickets on the next plane to Russia…and they were never seen or heard from again.

A DICTATOR MEETS THE DUKE

Wayne didn’t learn that the threat to his life had abated until 1959, when Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, visited the United States. (Stalin died in 1953.) The Duke met him at a reception hosted by Twentieth Century Fox. It was there, according to Munn, that Wayne pulled Khrushchev aside during a quiet moment and asked through an interpreter why the Soviets were trying to kill him. “That was the decision of Stalin during his last five mad years,” Khrushchev supposedly told the Duke. “When Stalin died, I rescinded the order.”

That took care of the threat posed by
Soviet
communists, but Khrushchev warned him that Mao Zedong, leader of Communist China, had been in on the plot to assassinate him, and was likely still trying to do so.

ONE LAST TRY

Wayne learned how serious Mao’s threat was when he made a three-week goodwill tour of Vietnam in the summer of 1966. Munn claims that during a visit to one village, Wayne was nearly shot by a sniper, who was later caught by U.S. troops. The sniper wasn’t Vietnamese, he was
Chinese
—and he said that he’d been sent to the village on Mao’s orders, specifically to kill John Wayne.

Part II of the story, turn to
page 515
, pilgrim
.

Ouch! Roman emperor Hadrian toured his entire empire on foot.

HIP-HOP LAWSUITS

We were going to do “lite jazz” lawsuits, but we couldn’t find any
.

T
he Plaintiff:
“Freeway” Ricky Ross, a Los Angeles gangster and drug kingpin in the early 1980s
The Defendant:
Rick Ro$$, a rap star from Miami

The Lawsuit:
Freeway was sentenced to life in prison in 1996. Ten years later, a young Miami rapper named William L. Roberts II signed with Def Jam records using the name Rick Ro$$, an homage of sorts to the convicted drug kingpin. And in addition to taking his name, Ro$$ adopted Freeway’s persona. Freeway was furious. His lawyers sent Def Jam several cease-and-desist letters, but they were ignored. Meanwhile, Ro$$ made a string of successful albums that glorified “his” drug-dealing past. As soon as Freeway got out on parole in 2010 (his sentence was reduced to 20 years), he filed suit against Ro$$, claiming that the rapper was profiting off his name and image. Not only that, he says, he planned to start a program to keep troubled youths out of prison, and Ro$$ is hindering that effort by tarnishing his reputation. Freeway is suing the rapper for $10 million plus half of his royalties.

The Verdict:
Pending.

The Plaintiff:
50 Cent

The Defendant:
Taco Bell

The Lawsuit:
In 2008 Taco Bell’s president, Greg Creed, wrote an open letter to 50 Cent asking him to change his name to 99 Cent and star in a commercial, rapping his order for items from Taco Bell’s value meal. “We know that you adopted the name 50 Cent years ago as a metaphor for change,” Creed wrote. “We at Taco Bell are also huge advocates for change. We encourage you to ‘Think outside the bun’ and hope you accept our offer.” Creed’s open letter ran in several publications, which 50 Cent claims led his fans to believe that he was in on the deal. He wasn’t. He filed a lawsuit against Taco Bell, alleging that “Taco Bell was, in effect, using his name in advertisements without his permission.” According to 50 Cent’s lawyer, “Taco Bell has used this infringing tactic before, issuing press releases using other celebrities’ names, such as Rihanna, Chris Brown, Fergie, and Paris Hilton.” According to 50 Cent, “When my legal team is finished with them, Taco Bell is going to have a new slogan: ‘We messed with the bull and got the horns!’”

The Verdict:
The case was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. Don’t expect to see 50 Cent rapping in a Taco Bell ad.

Some family: The fungus that causes athlete’s foot is in the same family as ringworm.

The Plaintiff:
Richard Monroe Jr., a 25-year-old hip-hop fan

The Defendant:
Snoop Dogg, The Game, Kurupt, Daz Dillinger, Soopafly, and several of Snoop Dogg’s bodyguards

The Lawsuit:
At a 2005 concert in Seattle, Washington, Snoop Dogg was performing when Monroe ran onto the stage and put his arm around Snoop’s shoulder. Bad idea: Snoop’s bodyguards, along with several other rappers, pounced on Monroe. “They beat me like a slave,” he later told reporters. In the melee, Monroe suffered bruised ribs, a broken nose, and a split lip. He also claimed that his diamond earrings were ripped out of his ears and his wallet and cell phone were stolen. No criminal charges were filed, so Monroe filed a $22-million civil suit, naming Snoop as the chief defendant. According to Monroe’s lawyers, Snoop invited him onto the stage. According to Snoop’s lawyers, Snoop only invites women on stage. In the video footage of the incident, there are so many fists and feet flying that it’s tough to tell who is doing what to whom, but it appears that Snoop was whisked away to safety while the beatdown occurred.

The Verdict:
The jury ruled that the response to Monroe jumping onstage was excessive, but that Snoop Dogg wasn’t involved. Instead of receiving $22 million, Monroe was awarded $449,400.

LIFE IMITATES A BOARD GAME

In the 1970s, British Petroleum released a board game for kids called “BP Offshore Oil Strike.” The goal: Find oil in the sea, build a rig, and get rich. The first player to make $120 million wins. But beware of the hazard cards, such as this one which reads: “Blow-out! Rig damaged. Oil slick cleanup costs. Pay $1 million.”

In 1988 Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash had heart surgery at the same time, in the same hospital.

REAL TEST ANSWERS

Sometimes, when knowledge is lacking, cleverness takes over. These are actual answers to questions on students’ tests submitted to education websites by frazzled teachers
.

Q:
What type of force or bond holds the sodium ions and chloride ions together in a crystal of sodium chloride?

A:
James Bond

Q:
What is hard water?

A:
Ice

Q:
What happens during puberty to a boy?

A:
He says goodbye to his childhood and enters adultery.