Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader (21 page)

Pieter van Loggerenberg
, Hoedspruit, South Africa

Achievement:
Played the accordion for 85 hours during a wildlife festival in 1987.

Michel Lotito
, Grenoble, France

Achievement:
Has been eating metal and glass since 1959; currently he eats more than two pounds of metal every day. Since 1966 he has eaten 10 bicycles, a supermarket food cart, 7 televisions, 6 chandeliers, a coffin, and a Cessna airplane.

“Country” Bill White,
Killeen, Texas

Achievement:
Buried alive in a coffin, more than six feet underground, for 341 days in July 1981. Only connection to the outside world: a four-inch tube used for feeding and breathing.

Name mentioned most frequently in the Bible: David. (Jesus is second.)

King Taufa’ahau
, Tonga

Achievement:
World’s fattest king; weighed 462 pounds in 1976.

Alfred West

Achievement:
Split a human hair into 17 different pieces “on eight different occasions.”

Remy Bricka
, Paris, France

Achievement:
In 1988, using 13-foot-long floating “skis,” he “walked” across the Atlantic Ocean from Tenerife, Spain, to Trinidad (a distance of 3,502 miles). The trip took 60 days.

Steve Urner
, Tehachapi, California

Achievement:
Threw a dried, “100% organic” cow chip more than 266 feet on August 4, 1981.

N. Ravi
, Tamil Nadu, India

Achievement:
Stood on one foot for 34 hours in 1982.

“Hercules” John Massis
, Oostakker, Belgium

Achievement:
Used teeth to stop a helicopter from taking off, 1979.

Zolilio Diaz
, Spain

Achievement:
Rolled a hoop from Mieres to Madrid, Spain, and back—a distance of more than 600 miles. It took him 18 days.

Nine employees of the Bruntsfield Bedding Centre
, Scotland.

Achievement:
Pushed a wheeled hospital bed 3,233 miles between June 21 and July 26, 1979.

Fred Jipp
, New York City, New York

Achievement:
Most illegal marriages. Between 1949 and 1981, using over 50 aliases, married 104 women in 27 states and 14 foreign countries. Sentenced to 34 years in prison and fined $336,000.

Octavio Guillen and Adriana Martinez
, Mexico City, Mexico

Achievement:
Longest engagement: 67 years. They finally tied the knot in 1969. Both were age 82.

Sisters Jill Bradbury and Chris Humpish
, London, England

Achievement:
Made a bed (2 sheets, 1 undersheet, 1 blanket, 1 pillow, and a bedspread) in 19 seconds flat on October 8, 1985.

An estimated 70% of the hats sold in the United States are baseball caps.

When people talk about “the birds and the bees,” this probably isn’t what they had in mind. Here are some of the weirder ways animals reproduce.

S
QUID

The male squid’s sperm are contained in ½-inch-long pencil-shaped “packages” called spermatophores, which are located in a pouch near his gills. When the male is ready to reproduce, he grabs some of the spermatophores with one of his tentacles and deposits them deep inside the gill chamber of a female squid. The spermatophores remain inside the female until she ovulates, when they explode into a cloud of sperm and fertilize the egg. (In some species the male’s arm breaks off inside the female and remains there until it is absorbed by her body.)

SLOTHS

Sloths are the only land animals besides humans that regularly mate face to face. One important difference: they do it while hanging from tree branches by their arms.

SEA URCHINS

Sea urchins expel their semen directly into the surrounding sea-water, doing nothing to ensure that it ever reaches an unfertilized egg. If the current is right, the semen will eventually be carried to an egg, and reproduction will take place.

“NOSE,” OR “VAQUERO,” FROGS

When the female is ready to reproduce, she lays 20 to 30 unfertilized eggs. Nearby male frogs surround the eggs, fertilize them, and then guard them for as long as two weeks. As soon as they can see tadpoles forming within the eggs, each frog immediately tries to “swallow” as many eggs as possible, depositing them in a large throat sac that extends from their chins to their thighs. The eggs remain there until the tadpoles metamorphosize completely into frogs, when they enter the world by crawling out of the father’s mouth.

The gorilla’s scientific name is “Gorilla gorilla gorilla.”

MUD TURTLES

The female mud turtle has a pair of bladders connected to her intestines that she uses to build a nesting pit for her eggs. When she is ready to lay her fertilized eggs, she fills the bladders with water, and then partially empties them over the patch of dirt she wants to use for her nest. Then she starts digging, emptying the rest of the water in her bladders as she digs. When the bladders are empty, she returns to the water to refill them, then returns to the nest and continues digging. When she finishes, she kicks her eggs into the hole with her feet or tail, and covers the nest with fresh mud.

EUROPEAN CUCKOOS

Like all species of cuckoos, the European cuckoo does not build its own nest. Instead, it lays its eggs in the nests of other species of birds. Some types of cuckoos remove the original eggs from the nest, other types leave them in the nest, and the host mother raises all the young as if they were her own. But the offspring of the European cuckoo are more aggressive than most: a few hours after one is born it begins kicking uncontrollably, an involuntary response that lasts about four days. By that time, the fledgling has usually kicked everything out of the nest—including any other baby birds.

SNAILS

Snails practice a form of foreplay in which they shoot chalky “love darts” at each other to determine if they are members of the same species. Because snails are hermaphrodites—they have male and female sex organs—each snail will impregnate the other.

DUCKS

According to one study, young male ducks are often disinterested in sex—even to the point of resisting the advances of females who are “in the mood.” Sometimes the ducks appear to make elaborate excuses for why they cannot have sex, such as chasing away an imaginary enemy, taking an unneeded bath, etc. But the male ducks make up for it in later life: after they select a mate.

AFRICAN ELEPHANTS

According to at least one study, female elephants act as midwives for one another when the hour of birth draws near. One researcher reponed observing three female elephants leaving their herd and approaching a thicket. One of the females went into the thicket, while the other two stood guard outside, driving away any elephant or other animal that tried to approach. After a while the sentries returned to the herd, followed shortly afterwards by the third elephant and her newborn.

Australia has more sheep than any other country on Earth.

SPIDERS

Because the male spider has no sex organ, he has to squeeze sperm from his belly onto his web, which he then picks up with his antennae before going off in search of a female spider. Male spiders also have to be careful once they find a female; if they aren’t careful, the female will bite their head off during sex.

PRAYING MANTISES

As soon as the male praying mantis mounts the female, the female bites his head off. Undeterred, the male continues mating while the female eats his shoulders and upper abdomen. Unlike most other creatures, the male mantis’s brain
prevents
him from releasing sperm, so the female
has
to bite his head off.

BEES

Only one male bee in a hive has the right to mate with the Queen, a process that takes about two seconds. When the male bee pulls away, his penis breaks off and remains inside the Queen, while he falls to the bottom of the hive and bleeds to death.

SNAKES

Female snakes mate with several male snakes during each mating cycle and can store sperm in their bodies for months. According to one theory, snakes do this in order to have a “sperm contest” inside their bodies, somehow allowing only the healthiest sperm to fertilize their eggs. This increases the number of live births per season, increasing the chance that the species will survive.

GREAT GREY SLUGS

Grey slugs are also hermaphrodites and engage in foreplay consisting of circling one another for hours, generating lots of slime in the process. Then they mate while hanging from ropes of slime.

Secret stash: FBI director J. Edgar Hoover kept a collection of pornography locked in his desk.

Harold Stassen almost won the GOP nomination for president in 1948. Did something “snap” when he lost? No one knows for sure, but he kept on running...and running...and running...

B
ACKGROUND.
Harold Stassen was the Republican “Boy Wonder” of Minnesota politics in the 1930s. He was elected governor of the state in 1937 at the age of 31, and re-elected in 1940 and 1942. He was widely regarded—by friends
and
foes—as presidential timber.

The Sure Thing.
Nineteen forty-eight was the presidential election Republicans had been waiting for: FDR was dead, and Harry Truman’s approval rating had slipped below 30%. The Republican nominee—whoever he was—was a shoo-in to claim the Oval Office. And Harold Stassen was a front-runner for the nomination.

Stassen steamrolled through the Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania primaries. And he lost New Jersey by only 600 votes, despite the fact that Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York was the favorite son of a neighboring state. Next, he stormed West Virginia, winning 117,000 of the state’s 139,000 votes. He looked unstoppable—until he got to Oregon.

The Loser.
Stassen had agreed to debate Dewey on May 17, 1948—only days before the Oregon primary—on the single issue of whether or not the Communist Party should be banned in the U.S. Stassen debated in favor of the ban; Dewey opposed it.

Stassen was the first candidate to speak, and he ripped into the Reds. “These Communist organizations are not really political parties. They actually are fifth columns....Governor Dewey’s position in effect means a soft policy towards Communism...we must not coddle Communism with legality.” One broadcaster later described Stassen’s delivery as being the “assured and authoritative delivery of a man comfortable with command.”

Next came Dewey’s turn to reply. He didn’t defend Communism, but he urged restraint in dealing with it: “The people of this country are being asked to outlaw Communism. That means this: Shall we in America, in order to defeat a totalitarian regime which we detest, voluntarily adopt the methods of that system?...I am unalterably, wholeheartedly, unswervingly against any scheme to write laws outlawing people because of their religious, political, social, or economic ideas.”

There are no words in the English language that rhyme with purple.

Dewey was an experienced district attorney, and his defense of his position was eloquent and masterful. In fact, he took such command of the debate that Stassen began to panic. Tom Swaford, a broadcaster who was there, described Stassen’s reaction:

Stassen’s rebuttal was so weak that Dewey shot back: “I gather from Mr. Stassen’s remarks that he has completely surrendered.” In a way, Stassen had. And in doing so, he lost more than just the debate: he lost the Oregon primary...and he lost his momentum. In the end, Dewey edged Stassen out for the Republican nomination.

World-Class Loser.
Some politicians would have retired gracefully after such a humiliating defeat, but not Stassen. He showed the form that makes him a truly world-class loser, continuing to run in races he had no chance to win for the next
45 years!
He ran for president in 1952, 1964, 1968, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988, and 1992. He lost races for mayor of Philadelphia (1962), senator of Minnesota (1978), another term as governor of Minnesota (1982), and a bid for Congress (1986).

Stassen became a national joke, usually referred to as “the perennial candidate.” In the 1992 Republican National Convention, delegates made fun of him with “Stop Stassen” buttons. “The ridicule bothers me,” said the 85-year-old candidate, “but it doesn’t stop me....Every one of the ten times [I’ve run], there has been some solid result.” Besides, he adds, “Winning is not the primary concern. My primary concern is to move America.”

Pop singer Michael Jackson collects mannequins.

We don’t want to make you paranoid, but all of these incidents really happened.

1.
In July 1956, a B-47 aircraft plowed into a storage igloo 20 miles outside of Cambridge, England. The plane’s jet fuel burst into flames almost immediately, but for some reason didn’t ignite the contents of the igloo. A lucky thing, too—it contained three Mark 6 nuclear bombs.

2.
In 1958 a B-47E accidentally dropped a nuclear bomb into a Mars Bluff, South Carolina, family’s vegetable garden. The bomb didn’t explode, but it did damage five houses and a church. Air Force officials apologized.

3.
In 1961 a B-52 dropped two 24-megaton bombs on a North Carolina farm. According to one physicist: “Only a single switch prevented the bombs from detonating.”

4.
In 1966 another B-52 carrying four 20-megaton bombs crashed in Palomares, Spain—with one of the bombs splashing into the Mediterranean Sea. It took the U.S. 6th fleet—using 33 ships and 3,000 men—several weeks to find the missing bomb.