Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (7 page)

Mongolian warrior helmets doubled as cooking pots—and inspired the Chinese wok.

THE MISTAKE:
His getaway vehicle was a bicycle. It took him a minute or so to get going (the mask, toy gun, and bag of money made it difficult). That was all the time that a police officer needed to chase down the clown and tackle him.

THE JOB:
Jarell Paul Arnold, 34, walked into a credit union in Anchorage, Alaska, in 2009, asked the teller to check his account balance, and then handed her a holdup note. She filled a bag with about $600, and Arnold fled the scene. Police arrived at the bank a few minutes later, but the suspect was nowhere to be found.

THE MISTAKE:
He asked the teller to check his account balance
— and showed her his driver’s license to verify his ID. The teller gave the information to the cops; Arnold is now serving 12 years in prison for bank robbery, with no time off for stupid behavior.

THE JOB:
In 2009 a would-be bank robber in Kirchheim, Austria, approached the door of the bank, donned a Barack Obama mask, took out a gun, and went to open the door.

THE MISTAKE:
The bank was closed. It had been for 35 minutes. Inside were several bank employees taking part in a training session. The frustrated bank robber banged his gun on the window. According to one of the workers, “We thought it was part of the training, some sort of initiative test, or a joke. Laughing only seemed to make him more angry.” The robber gave up and left.

THE JOB:
A man stuffed a knife into his front pants pocket and walked into a bank in Kumagaya, Japan, in 2010.

THE MISTAKE:
He didn’t really know
how
to rob a bank, so he asked a teller, “Any idea how you rob a bank?” The teller asked her supervisor what to do if someone asks how to rob a bank. The supervisor politely asked the man to leave. He did, but the worker who was escorting him out noticed blood running down the man’s thigh. Somehow, he’d stabbed himself with his knife. He was taken to a hospital, treated, and arrested—but for illegal possession of a weapon, not for attempted robbery. (He didn’t actually rob the bank; he only asked
how
to do it.)

Length of the average professional fireworks show in 1980: 1 hour. Today: 20 minutes.

DOT BOMBS

Today we take buying things over the Internet for granted. But the concept of e-commerce was brand new in the 1990s, as billions of dollars were invested in new Internet companies. And nearly all of them fizzled—some because they were ahead of their time, others simply because they were bad ideas. Here’s a look at some of the biggest Internet busts
.

C
OMPANY:
Flooz.com

PRODUCT:
Internet currency

LOADING…
Most Americans do at least some online shopping or bill paying today, but in 1998 people were scared and skeptical about giving a credit card number over the Internet. So
Flooz.com
conceived a “safe” Internet currency. Consumers were supposed to go to
Flooz.com
, enter in their credit card number, and buy Internet money, or “Flooz,” which could then be used to pay for purchases at online merchants. Based on that concept, Flooz secured $34 million from investors and agreements with Tower Records, Barnes & Noble, Restoration Hardware, and other retailers to accept Flooz as legal tender on their websites.

…FILE NOT FOUND:
A large percentage of Flooz’s budget went to TV commercials starring celebrity spokesperson Whoopi Goldberg. But the idea never quite caught on—as people became more comfortable with buying things over the Internet and as major retailers started securing credit card data with a new, nearly impenetrable data-disguising system called
encryption,
few thought it was necessary to buy special online money. Flooz flopped on August 26, 2001, after which all outstanding “flooz”—and $34 million in investors’ money—turned to dust.

COMPANY:
Webvan.com

PRODUCT:
Groceries

LOADING…
The service offered by this Internet-based company was both old and new: Home delivery of groceries, which was once common but hadn’t been offered since the mid-20th century, when Americans started switching from local grocers to chain supermarkets. In Webvan’s business model, groceries would be ordered off the Internet and arrive at the customer’s home via a nearly fully automated process (the vans still required people to drive them). It seemed like a great idea to a lot of people: Webvan raised and spent more than $1 billion, using the funds to expand outside of its San Francisco home area to eight more cities in just over a year. Most of the money went for computerized warehouse facilities where orders were automatically boxed, sorted, and loaded onto delivery trucks. By mid-2000,
Webvan.com
was valued at $1.2 billion and announced plans to expand into 18 more metropolitan areas.

It takes 50 pounds of olives to produce one gallon of olive oil.

…FILE NOT FOUND:
E-commerce may have changed many elements of business, but it did not change the fact that a company needs a certain number of customers to turn a profit. Webvan looked good to investors, but it expanded too fast. Furthermore, grocery profit margins are very slim—not enough to cover $1 billion worth of state-of-the-art distribution centers. Webvan spoiled in July 2001, its share price having dropped from $30 to 6¢ in a matter of months. The brand name—not the company—resurfaced in 2009 as “a member of the Amazon family.”

COMPANY:
MVP.com

PRODUCT:
Sporting goods

LOADING…
This company had a lot going for it at its 1999 launch: Its investors included beloved sports icons (and seasoned product endorsers) such as quarterback John Elway, basketball superstar Michael Jordan, and hockey icon Wayne Gretzky. That seemed like a big advantage for a company selling sporting goods online. Another advantage:
MVP.com
had a lucrative advertising deal—a four-year contract with CBS Television in which the online merchant got consistent ad time during the broadcast of CBS’s highly watched NFL games. In return, CBS got an equity stake in the company, with a guaranteed annual payout of $10 million.

…FILE NOT FOUND:
But just a year later,
MVP.com
failed to pay CBS its $10 million…because it didn’t have the $10 million to pay. In fact, the company never turned a profit. (Marketing experts say the advertising deal was ill-conceived—sports spectators are not necessarily sports
participants
.) When they didn’t receive their cut, CBS voided the contract…and canceled all of
MVP.com
’s future advertising.
MVP.com
was KO’d at the end of 2000. Its address (
www.mvp.com
) was taken over by SportsLine, a new sports news service managed by…CBS.

Made guys: 27 actors from the movie
Goodfellas
also appeared on
The
Sopranos
.

WHEN WORDS COLLIDE

Wii hate when someone points out that weave used the wrong word to describe something, sew we complied this list of commonly misspelled or misused wurds
.

• A
capital
is a nation or state’s principal city, which houses the
capitol,
the building in which lawmakers convene.

• To
flounder
is to struggle. But if you do it for long, you may
founder,
or completely unravel and come apart.

• A
hoard
is a large group of objects. A
horde
is a large group of people.

• Light can pass through a
translucent
object and become obscured. If the light goes all the way through, then the surface is
transparent
.

•
Flotsam
is cargo lost at sea, floating on the surface.
Jetsam
is jettisoned cargo that sinks to the bottom of the sea.

• To feel hostility toward something is to be
adverse
.
To be completely opposed to it outright is to be
averse
.

•
Emigrants
leave their homeland to reside in another place. Once they’re in the new place, they’re called
immigrants
.

•An
amiable
person is cheerful and good-natured. An
amicable
person is cooperative.

• A
distinct
object is one that is clearly visible; a
distinctive
one is unique or unusual.

• A saying by a famous person is a
quotation,
not a quote.
Quote
is a verb that means to repeat somebody else’s words.

• A
crevasse
is a deep, wide crack. A
crevice
is a small, narrow crack.

•
Elicit
means to draw out something through persuasion, such as secret information. That info might have been a secret because it contained evidence of illegal or
illicit
activities.

• An
eminent
person is someone who is well known and highly regarded. The word
imminent
describes an event that is about to take place.

• Your
conscience
is your moral center, your sense of right vs. wrong.
Conscious
is an adjective that means to be awake and aware.

The Greatest: Muhammad Ali’s charities have fed 22 million meals to the hungry.

LUCKY FINDS

Ever stumbled across something valuable? It’s an incredible feeling. Here’s the latest installment of a
Bathroom Reader
favorite
.

L
ET ME STAND NEXT TO YOUR FIRE

The Find:
A burned guitar

Where It Was Found:
Under a pile of junk in a garage

The Story:
In 1967, while performing at the Finsbury Astoria, an old theater in North London, Jimi Hendrix doused his Fender Stratocaster with lighter fluid, lit a match, and set the guitar on fire. The roadies rushed in and put the fire out; Hendrix had to be taken to the hospital to be treated for minor burns. That performance was a defining moment in rock history, but the guitar itself was thought to have been lost. It changed several hands several times: Bassist Noel Redding had it at first, but it ended up with Hendrix’s press officer, Tony Garland, who stored it in his parents’ garage in East Sussex…and forgot about it. It remained there, untouched, for nearly 40 years, until Garland’s nephew unearthed it in 2007. The guitar—one of two that Hendrix burned, and the only one that survived—was sold to an American collector for $430,000. He said he was going to put some new strings on it, plug it in, and see if any of that “Hendrix magic” is still there.

WHAT THE FUGUE?

The Find:
A musical symphony

Where It Was Found:
In a library basement

The Story:
Heather Carbo, a librarian at the Palmer Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, had heard a rumor that a symphony written in Beethoven’s own hand was stored somewhere in the seminary. But no one had ever seen it, and it was probably just that, a rumor. Then, one summer day in 2005, Carbo was cleaning out some cabinets in the library’s basement and found a colorful, hardbound book. The moment she saw it, she suspected it was the Beethoven symphony, but she can’t read music (or German), so she called in musical experts, who verified that it was indeed Beethoven’s “Gross Fugue in B flat major.” Released in 1826, less than a year before Beethoven’s death, the fugue—with its frequent use of dissonance—was panned by the critics. (It’s since been called “ahead of its time.”) The 80-page manuscript revealed the work of a composer who was constantly erasing and revising, and who wrote notes in the margins on everything from proper piano fingering techniques to his own dissatisfaction with the work. “This piece, more than any other, shows Beethoven striving for something beyond all human limits,” said American composer Gerald Levinson. How did it get to an American seminary? In 1890 it was purchased in Germany by Cincinnati industrialist William Howard Doane. The manuscript was thought to have been a part of a collection donated to the seminary by Sloane’s daughter in 1950, but everything else from that collection (including an original Mozart manuscript) had been accounted for. For decades, historians assumed that Beethoven’s Gross Fugue was lost forever. In December 2005 it was sold at auction to an anonymous buyer. Sale price: $1.7 million.

Your words, their property: Many social-networking sites have policies granting them legal ownership of your posts.

GETTING A LITTLE ACTION

The Find:
A comic book