Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader (15 page)

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”

—Joseph Brodsky

In the 1800s, people segregated their books by the sex of the author.

Let it all hang out
.

“Take off all your clothes and walk down the street waving a machete and firing an Uzi, and terrified citizens will phone the police and report: ‘There’s a naked person outside!’”

—Mike Nichols

“On the fourth day of telecommuting, I realized that clothes are totally unnecessary.”

—Dilbert

“I often think that a slightly exposed shoulder emerging from a long satin nightgown is far more sexy than two naked bodies in bed.”

—Bette Davis

“I’ve posed nude for a photographer in the manner of Rodin’s ‘Thinker,’ but I merely looked constipated.”

—George Bernard Shaw

“I can’t bear being seen naked. I’m not exactly a tiny woman. When Sophia Loren is naked, this is a lot of nakedness.”

—Sophia Loren

“And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.”

—Genesis (2:25)

“I used to sleep nude—until the earthquake.”

—Alyssa Milano

“What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?”

—Michelangelo

“My school colors were clear. We used to say, ‘I’m not naked, I’m in the band.’”

—Steven Wright

“When you’ve seen a nude infant doing a backward somersault, you know why clothing exists.”

—Stephen Fry

“I think onstage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic, and a progressive religious experience.”

—Shelley Winters

“There are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth.”

—Agnes Repplie

Fred Rogers took a morning swim every day in the nude.

The fact that hundreds of thousands of pounds of aluminum and pretzels can fly is weird enough, but it gets weirder
.

C
OMPLAINT DEPARTMENT

Artyom Chernopup, a passenger on a Russian Aeroflot flight, was upset because some of the flight attendants were obviously intoxicated. When he complained about it, three of the drunken crew members beat him up. Chernopup planned to press charges; Aeroflot announced that the entire crew would be “temporarily dismissed.”

WALK THIS WAY

A 35-year-old man was asked to remove his belt while he was going through airport security in Cologne, Germany. He refused. When told that he
had
to do it to get on the plane, he angrily took off his belt—and his pants—and walked through the detector in his underwear. (No alarms sounded.)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

Louis Paul Kadlecek of Angelton, Texas, started celebrating his 21st birthday on February 25, 2004. He was still drunk four days later when he decided to break into the Brazoria County Airport and steal an airplane (he had never flown one before). He got into a single-engine Cessna (with a case of beer) and took off. A mile later he flew the plane into a 100,000-volt power line, cutting off electricity to a large portion of the county, and plunged 100 feet to the ground. The drunken man then got up and walked the three miles back to his home. Police arrested him the next morning. When asked where he had planned to take the plane, he answered, “I don’t know—Mexico, maybe.” He faces up to 20 years in prison.

IT’S NOT FUNNY

A week after two America West pilots were fired for showing up drunk, a passenger was thrown off an America West plane in San Francisco when she jokingly asked flight attendants if they had “checked the crew for sobriety.” The airline said the woman’s remarks “constituted a potential security problem.” David Stempler, president of the Air Travelers Association, called it an abuse of authority. “They ought to put up a big sign with an ‘H’ and a slash through it for ‘No Humor Zone’ because there’s no joking allowed.”

Length of time it takes a drop of ocean water to travel around the world: 1,000 years.

DID THEY SEE ANYTHING?

Several security screeners at Denver International Airport were reprimanded in 2004 after they sent themselves through the X-ray machine “to see what their brains looked like.”

HOW MANY WERE DETAINED? NUN.

An American Airlines plane was evacuated in Dallas because someone thought they detected a strange smell onboard. No problem was found, so they let all the passengers back on, except for four nuns. The four Indian-born nuns, who were returning home to California from their Christmas vacation, were questioned for six hours before they were allowed to get on another flight. The explanation: “The crew members didn’t feel comfortable taking you inside.” “We didn’t know we looked suspicious,” said Sister Tessy Pius. (American Airlines later sent them a formal apology.)

JAILBIRD

Perhaps they saw a telltale bump in his pants. Or heard chirping noises. Or maybe it was just because he was arriving from Cuba. Whatever the reason, airport inspectors were suspicious of Carlos Avila when he landed in Miami in October 2001. They asked him to raise his pant legs...and discovered he had 44 birds strapped to his legs. Smuggling charges were made worse by the fact that Avila had signed papers specifically stating that he was not bringing birds into the United States. He was sentenced to six months in prison.

BETTER THAN A SEAT BELT

In 2002 the BBC reported that a woman on a Scandinavian Airlines flight got stuck to the airplane toilet when she pushed the button for the vacuum-powered flush. Sealed to the seat, she was unable to get up until technicians pried her loose hours later, after the plane had landed in the United States. (Great story, huh? Unfortunately it never really happened. At first Scandinavian Airlines confirmed the story, then later claimed it was all a big mistake—probably a fictional emergency from a training manual.)

Longest running product endorsement in history: Bill Cosby for Jell-O.

We often write about weird things that happen in everyday life. Turns out they happen in death, too
.

D
ON’T WORRY, BE HAPPY

“A Thai ice-cream truck driver died laughing in his sleep, the newspaper
The Nation
reported. Damnoen Saen-um, 52, laughed for about two minutes and then stopped breathing. The newspaper said Damnoen’s wife tried to wake him but he kept laughing. ‘It is possible that a person could have a heart attack while laughing or crying too hard in their sleep,’ said Dr. Somchai Chakrabhand, deputy director of the Mental Health Department. ‘But I have never seen a case like this before.’”

—
Herald Sun
, Australia

BRITON OF THE SEA

“An Englishman has applied for permission to be fed to Great White sharks off South Africa after he dies. Robert Blackwood, a property developer, wants his dead body thrown into waters off Gans Bay, Cape Town. He admits he has never seen a live shark or been to South Africa—he made his decision after watching a television documentary by the author of
Jaws
. Gans Bay resident George Smit, who has been diving with sharks for 23 years, says the idea wouldn’t work because white sharks aren’t interested in human blood. ‘The sharks wouldn’t give it a second glance,’ he said. ‘It would rot and be eaten by crayfish.’”

—
Sunday Times
, South Africa

DEATH INSURANCE

“A cemetery in Santiago, Chile, is offering its clients coffins with sensors that detect any movement inside after they have been buried. According to a spokesperson for the cemetery, ‘We want to be pioneers and avoid catalepsy cases, in which a person gets completely paralysed for a few hours and ends up buried as if they were dead. We want families to rest assured that if a case like this ever happens their loved ones will be immediately rescued.’”

—BBC News

A single tiger can eat six tons of meat a year...the equivalent of 60,000 hamburgers.

TO MAKE IT UP TO YOU...

“An Italian family recently learned they had been praying at the wrong grave for 15 years. The Belforte cemetery, near Varese, exhumed the body in an unrelated legal matter and discovered that the tombstone on the grave had been mixed up with that on the grave next to it when the person was buried, Italian newspaper
Corriere della Sera
reported. The family have said they plan legal action over the mix-up but local authorities have apologised and offered a ‘free grave plot’ as compensation.”

—Ananova

SHOTGUN FUNERAL

“The widow of an expert on shotguns had her husband’s ashes loaded into cartridges and used by 20 close friends for the last shoot of the season. A total of 275 12-bore cartridges were produced from the mix and were blessed by a minister before they were used. The widow, Joanna Booth, of London, said it was a marvelous day out and her husband would have loved it. ‘It was not James’ dying wish,’ she said, ‘but he had read somewhere that someone had done it and he thought it was very funny.’ The special cartridges accounted for 70 partridges, 23 pheasants, seven ducks, and a fox.”

—The London Telegraph

DEATH OF THE FUTURE?

“Concerns about the environmental impact of cremation and burial has led Swedish firm Promessa Organic AB to a chilling alternative—freezing bodies in liquid nitrogen, then using sound waves to smash the brittle remains into a powder. Bodies would be dipped in liquid nitrogen with a temperature of –196°C. Extracted from the super-cold solution, the bodies would be brittle as glass and could be broken down with bursts of sound. ‘The method is based upon preserving the body after death, while avoiding harmful embalming fluid,’ said Susanne Wiigh-Maesak, a spokesperson for Promessa. The remains, buried in a coffin crafted from cornstarch, would take about a year to break down and return to the soil. ‘On top of the grave you can set a plant that would take advantage of the nutrients in the ‘compost’,’ Wiigh-Maesak said, adding that she herself would very much like to become a white rhododendron.”

—Associated Press

On average, men spend 45 seconds in a public restroom stall. Women typically spend 80.

Ever wonder where words come from? Here are the interesting stories behind some everyday words
.

M
ARMALADE

Meaning:
A jellylike preserve made from the pulp and rind of fruits, especially citrus fruits

Origin:
“It was said that when Mary Queen of Scots was out of sorts, she would refuse to eat. The only food that could tempt her was a conserve of oranges. Hence the name of this jam after the Queen’s indisposition:
Marie malade
(‘sick Mary’). The word’s
true
ancestor, however, is the Latin
melimelum
, meaning ‘sweet apple.’” (From
The Story Behind the Word
, by Morton Freeman)

OSTRACIZE

Meaning:
To banish or exclude from a group

Origin:
“In ancient Greece, the Athenians voted against a statesman by placing his name on an
ostrakon
, an earthenware tablet. Six thousand adverse votes constituted a decree of banishment.” (From
Classical Word Origins
, by Harry E. Wedeck)

DUMBBELL

Meaning:
A short bar with weights at each end, used for exercise

Origin:
“Some 250 years ago someone noticed that bell ringers attained a remarkable muscular development of the chest, shoulders, and arms. Whoever he was, he invented a device which simulated the bell ringer’s gallery, but without the bells. Because there was no bell attached, it became known as a
dumb bell
. Someone else discovered that one could get the same exercise without most of the cumbersome contrivance, using only a wooden or metal bar.” (From
Thereby Hangs a Tale
, by Charles Earle Funk)

DISMAL

Meaning:
Causing gloom or depression; dreary

Origin:
“First mentioned in 1256 as the Anglo-French name for French
les mals jours
, the evil days, from the Latin
dies mali
, or unlucky days. First computed by Egyptian astrologers, the
dies mali
were the days of the medieval calendar when it was unwise to begin any undertaking: January 1 and 25, February 4 and 26, March 1 and 28, April 10 and 20—and so on, two per month, through the year.” (From
More About Words
, by Margaret S. Ernst)

Q: What are
ephelides
? A: Freckles.

CAPITAL

Meaning:
Wealth in the form of money or property