Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (58 page)

Almost 30 years after its initial debut in the attic of London’s Royal Court Theatre,
Rocky
still plays every weekend at midnight in theaters across the United States and around the world. And in November 2000
The Rocky Horror Show
returned to Broadway… this time to critical praise and commercial success. It was nominated for several Tony Awards, including Best Revival.

Launching Pad

Can you picture actor Russell Crowe in high heels and a black bustier? In the 1980s, the Academy Award–winning star of
Gladiator
toured Australia and New Zealand singing and dancing through more than 400 performances of
The Rocky Horror Show,
including several times as the cross-dressing Dr. Frank N. Furter.

Hedging bets: There are more churches per capita in Las Vegas than in any other U.S. city.

Sophisticated products for the discriminating dog, sent in by
BRI
fan, Joe Atkins.

D
OG DOORBELL
($29.95,
Hammacher Schlemmer):
When doggie wants to go out, he can trigger this device by stepping on a paw-shaped radio transmitter, which activates a remote chime—letting master know that nature is calling.

EXCLUSIVE MEMORY FOAM DOG BED
($139.95,
Hammacher Schlemmer):
Using space-age technology, the Memory Foam Bed reacts with your dog’s body heat, molding itself to the animal’s contours, promoting healthy circulation, and eliminating stress on pressure points.

IONIC BATH PET BRUSH
($49.95,
The Sharper Image):
If you love your puppy but not his smell, this brush showers your pet with safe amounts of ozone particles, neutralizing odors and conditioning his fur.

DELIGHTED DOGGY PET TUNES
($9.99,
PetsMart): A
CD for dogs? Yes, and it’s not just for your pooch: “Try sitting and listening to it together—you’ll both benefit from relaxing and hearing these timeless selections.”

OH MY DOG! EAU DE TOILETTE SPRAY
($38, Saks
Fifth Avenue):
The world’s first top-quality fragrance crafted especially for canines! “Top notes of rosewood and orange leaves suggest happy barking while the heart notes evoke a boisterous tussle in the grass.” Also available: Oh My Cat!

BOW-LINGUAL DOG TRANSLATOR
(About $100— Japan only):
This amazing device translates barks, growls, and whines into common emotions, using a 200-word vocabulary. With a tiny microphone that attaches to the dog’s collar, this pager-sized device generates sentences like “I feel lonely” and “Mega happy day!”

MUTTLUKS BOOTIES
($40, In the Company of Dogs):
If you worry about your dog pal getting hypothermia in cold winter weather, Muttluks Booties can help. Their water- and salt-resistant leather soles will shield his paws from the cold as he plays in the snow, and reflective straps make sure he can be seen at night. Available in Yellow All-Weather and Black Fleece.

When given unlimited access to mice, cats will kill about 15 before stopping.

Some enlightening thoughts from, Voltaire, France’s premier philosopher and satirist from the Age of Enlightenment.

“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.”

“One day everything will be well, that is our hope. Everything’s fine today, that is our illusion.”

“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.”

“Prejudice is the reason of fools.”

“If you have two religions in your land, the two will cut each other’s throats; but if you have thirty religions, they will dwell in peace.”

“The biggest reward for a thing well done is to have done it.”

“Common sense is not so common.”

“History is little else than a picture of human crimes and misfortunes.”

“The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.”

“The progress of the rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.”

“Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.”

“When it’s a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.”

“One owes respect to the living, to the dead one owes only truth.”

“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”

“One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.”

“A witty saying proves nothing.”

“It’s dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.”

Stand tall: First person to stand during the national anthem: Daniel Webster.

You can’t help laughing at some of life’s
—
and death’s— ironies…as long as they happen to someone else. These stories speak for themselves.

B
OB TALLEY,
centenarian

Final Irony:
Talley passed away in London during his 100th birthday party, moments after receiving a telegram of congratulations from the Queen and telling friends, “Yes, I made it to 100.”

RALPH BREGOS,
heart patient

Final Irony:
Bregos, 40, spent more than two years wondering if a suitable donor heart would ever become available. Finally in 1997, doctors told him that one had been found. Bregos became so excited at the news that he suffered a massive heart attack and died.

STANLEY GOLDMAN,
candidate for mayor of Hollywood

Final Irony:
At one campaign stop, Goldman chided his opponent for being “too old for the job.” Moments later, he dropped dead from a heart attack.

ROBERT SHOVESTALL,
gun enthusiast in Glendale, California

Final Irony:
Shovestall, 37, died from an accidental gunshot wound. According to news reports, he placed a .45-caliber pistol he thought was unloaded under his chin and pulled the trigger. The incident took place “after his wife’s complaints about his 70 guns prompted him to demonstrate they were safe.”

ANONYMOUS MAN,
from West Plains, Missouri

Final Irony:
According to news reports, the suicidal man set himself on fire, only to change his mind moments later and jump into a pond to extinguish the flames. Cause of death: drowning.

ELIZABETH FLEISCHMAN ASCHEIM,
pioneering X-ray technician at the turn of the 20th century

Final Irony:
Ascheim often X-rayed herself to show patients that the treatment was safe. Cause of death: “severe skin cancer.”

Happy Hour: Most ice cream is eaten in the evening, between 9:00 and 11:00 p.m.

Here are a few more of our favorite classic hoaxes.

Background:
On November 8, 1918, the United Press Association became the first news organization to report that Germany had signed an armistice agreement, bringing World War I to an end. From there the news spread quickly, as papers all over the country ran the story beneath banner headlines. “The public response was what might have been expected,” Curtis D. MacDougal writes in Hoaxes. “Factory whistles blew, church bells rang, parades were organized, public leaders addressed jubilant crowds, and bonfires were lighted. It was a wild, nationwide demonstration.”

Exposed:
Unfortunately, it was also a deliberate hoax, which started when “someone, now commonly believed to have been a German secret agent,” telephoned the French and American intelligence offices to report that Germany had signed the armistice. From there the story was passed to United Press president Roy Howard in Europe, who cabled the story back to his offices in the United States.

Within the hour, Howard discovered the story was false, but it was too late—cable traffic was backlogged and a second message with instructions to disregard wasn’t delivered until 24 hours later. By then, MacDougall writes, the story had became “the most colossal journalistic blunder” of World War I. The real armistice was signed a few days later, on November 11, 1918.

Background:
In 1725 Dr. Johannes Beringer, dean of the medical school at the University of Würzburg, astonished the scientific world by announcing the discovery of hundreds of tiny fossils as well as a number of clay tablets, “including one signed by Jehovah.” In 1726, Dr. Beringer published a book theorizing that the tablets and the fossils had been carved from solid stone by God.

Exposed:
Beringer’s book took the academic world by storm… until rumors began to surface that the tablets were fakes, the work of two of Beringer’s enemies on the faculty of the University of Würzburg: J. Ignatz Roderick, a geography professor, and Georg von Eckhart, the university’s librarian. When Roderick and von Eckhart confessed to staging the hoax, Beringer accused them of spreading false rumors to undermine the importance of his discovery. Then he examined the tablets a little more closely and found his own name inscribed on some of them.

Cornucopia: A typical supermarket displays more than 25,000 items.

Rather than admit he’d been had, Beringer tried to cover up the scandal by buying all outstanding copies of his book. He might have succeeded, had word of what he was doing not leaked out. Suddenly, the book became a collector’s item. Beringer’s professional reputation was destroyed and the man once considered “one of the preeminent scholars of the day” went to his grave a laughingstock.

Final Note:
Ironically, the hoax actually contributed to the advancement of science: Beringer’s theory of the divine origin of fossils (which unlike the tablets,
were
authentic) was so thoroughly discredited, Carl Sifakis writes in Hoaxes
and Scams,
that “scholars began more and more to embrace Leonardo da Vinci’s suggestion that fossils were the remains of a former age.”

Background:
In 1926 a Harvard University student newspaper announced an “Anti-Smut” campaign, calling it “an organized attempt to aid the police in their diligent prosecution of filth in Harvard University.” They sponsored a campus rally and hung posters reading HELP THE OFFICERS TO KEEP YOU CLEAN and DON’T BE DIRTY! all over campus.

Exposed:
The newspaper sponsoring Anti-Smut Week was actually the
Harvard Lampoon,
and the campaign was their prankish response to the Boston Police Department’s seizure of the
Lampoon
parody of the
Literary Digest,
after the
Boston Telegraph
attacked it as “obscene.”

The
Telegraph
fell for the stunt, crediting their own “vigorous denunciations of the moral uncleanness in the atmosphere of Harvard, as shown by the publication of obscenity that nauseated the public,” as the inspiration for Anti-Smut Week.

In the densest jungle, only 1% of sunlight ever reaches the forest floor.

If you had lived in the 1840s, you probably wouldn’t have owned even a single photograph. Here’s the story of how
—
and why
—
photos became affordable. (Turn to
page 273
for the previous part of this history.)

For all of the improvements that had been made to them, daguerreotypes and calotypes still had a lot of problems. Daguerreotype images not only could not be duplicated, they were also reverse images: any writing that appeared in the picture, be it on a street sign, in a shop window, or on the stern of a ship, appeared backward, something that was terribly distracting to the viewer.

Calotype images didn’t have those problems—they were printed from negatives, so 1) the images were not reversed, and 2) you could make as many prints as you wanted. But calotype negatives were made of opaque paper. The resulting image was blurrier than a daguerreotype, and the grainy surface of the photographic paper used to make prints only made things worse.

People wanted the best of both worlds: pictures as sharp and clear as a daguerreotype that could be easily duplicated like a calotype. The obvious solution was to replace the calotype’s paper negatives with negatives made of smooth-surfaced glass. Figuring out how to do this was a challenge, however, because the nonporous surface of the glass was so slippery that photographic chemicals wouldn’t stick to it. Scientists tried everything to get them to stick (including smearing glass with snail slime), but nothing seemed to work.

Then in 1847, Claude-Félix-Abel Niepce de Saint-Victor, nephew of photographic pioneer Joseph Niepce, finally found something that did the trick: egg whites, also known as albumen. It got the chemicals to stick, and the images that resulted were as crystal clear as daguerreotypes and as easy to duplicate as calotypes. But the exposure times for albumen plates were so long that the plates couldn’t be used for portraits.