Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (53 page)

Dinner:
Another pound of pasta, an entire large pizza, and another 1,000 calories worth of energy drinks.

Strange tales of creatures great and small
.

L
OUNGING LIZARDS
A rare deep freeze hit the Florida Keys in early 2008 and fooled the native iguana population…into hibernation. Hundreds of the lizards fell out of trees and lied motionless on the ground, prompting concerned Floridians to take the stiff animals into their homes to warm them up. Bad idea: “When they warm up, they go back to being a wild animal,” explained a local veterinarian. The iguanas (some as long as five feet) started thrashing about the houses, causing extensive damage and in some cases, they bit people.

After a bear repeatedly stole honey from Zoran Kiseloski’s bees, the Macedonian beekeeper installed bright lights and a sound system on his farm. For two weeks, he blared the music of Serbian “turbo-funk” star Cera. The tactic worked…until the generator stopped working. Then the bear came back. That prompted Kiseloski to take legal action: He sued the bear. A local judge listened to the beekeeper’s testimony and, amazingly, found the bear guilty of theft. However, since the bear wasn’t present, the judge ordered the state to compensate Kiseloski 140,000 denars ($3,500) for his losses.

Shortly after the Warwickshire Animal Sanctuary in Nuneaton, England, took in a parrot named Barney in 2005, they discovered—the hard way—that the bird had learned a few choice phrases from its original owner. When the town’s mayor and a female vicar visited, Barney told the mayor to “F*** off!” When the vicar asked if she had heard what she
thought
she’d heard, Barney squawked, “You can f*** off, too!” They thought it was funny, but sanctuary owner Geoff Grewcock didn’t. He decided it was time to put the rude bird in a private cage…but not before Barney had taught two other parrots at the sanctuary how to to curse. “It sounds like a construction site, with all the verbal abuse flying about,” said Grewcock.

Lipstick manufacturers do whatever they can to stand out. One way to do that is to give the colors weird names. Here are some we came across. (They’re real.)

Barbarella

Beautiful Liar

Damage

Jail Bait

Catfight

Funny Face

Hot Voodoo

Suzi Sells Sushi
By the Seashore

Manhunt

Promiscuous

Hellbent

Everlasting Rum

Nice Knickers

Mindgame

Heartbreak Heather

Silent Mauvie

Raisin’ Cane

Thursday

Melon of Troy

Celebrity Meltdown

But Officer

Gypsy Soiree

St. Pertersburgundy

No Competition

La La Land

Trailer Trash

Cash Flow

Smitten

Woolloomooloo

Electric Banana

Sex Kitten

Sell Out

How to Jamaica Million

Smut

In a Nutshell

Foolish Virgin

Go Fig

Vamp

Crazed

Boiling Point

Hot Pants

Tempt Me

Chai Love You

Box-Office Beige

Plum Plot

Nude Beach

Scorption

Taxi Cab

Toast of the Town

Devil’s Claw

Sweet Mama

Marooned

Diva Brown

Mischief

Poppy Dust

Phantom

Sugar and Spice

Wuss

Bambi

Mystery

Marcia Marcia
Marcia

Cowboy

Gidget

Metal Glamour

Zsa Zsa

Many
Bathroom Readers
ago, we wrote about the 1938 radio broadcast of
The War of the Worlds
. Here’s what happened when a radio station in
Ecuador performed its own version of the drama 11 years later
.

S
PECIAL REPORTS
The story of the
War of the Worlds
radio broadcast is well known: In 1938 Orson Welles adapted H.G. Wells’s classic science fiction novel into a radio drama told in the form of emergency news broadcasts describing the invasion of Earth by hostile aliens from Mars. Despite the fact that the show was a regularly scheduled installment of Welles’s
Mercury Theater On the Air
, and that it was introduced as fiction, many listeners mistakenly believed that Martians had actually landed in New Jersey.

Welles later apologized, insisting that he hadn’t intended to fool anyone—it had all been an unfortunate misunderstanding. Six years later, in Santiago, Chile, the radio drama was restaged with similar results. Although the radio station in Santiago advertised the program for a full week before it aired, and made several announcements during the show intended to prevent listeners from becoming alarmed, the broadcast still resulted in mass confusion and was blamed for causing at least one fatal heart attack.

Just a few years later, in 1949, a radio station in Quito, Ecuador, decided to produce a new version of
War of the Worlds
, but this one was different: Radio Quito pulled out all the stops in an effort to convince everyone within broadcast range that Ecuador was actually being attacked by invaders from outer space.

Here’s how they did it: Weeks before the show was to air, the station began planting fake UFO-sighting stories in the local newspaper. That, producers hoped, would soften up the audience, making them more vulnerable to the suggestion that they were under alien attack. Then they swore all the actors and production staff to complete secrecy and, amazingly, no one leaked the real story to the press. Finally, they began the show by actually interrupting regularly scheduled programming to bring citizens of
Quito—a city of 250,000 people—the “breaking news” that the town of Latacunga, just 20 miles south, was under attack.

At that moment, the only people in Quito who knew it was just a radio play were inside the studio. Simply refusing to let on in any way that the story was fake would have been bad enough, but Radio Quito went a step further, and had one of the actors imitate the voice of Quito’s mayor. Women and children, the fake mayor instructed, should run into the jungle and hide. All able-bodied men, meanwhile, were to arm themselves in preparation to mount a defense of the city.

Listeners, meanwhile, had no way of knowing that what they were hearing wasn’t real. Skeptics had only to look out their windows to see that
something
was going on. Interviewed a half-century later, one witness to that night’s events in Quito recalled his family piling into their car to flee the city. He described complete chaos on the roads, where thousands of residents believed they were fleeing for their lives.

The chaos found its way to the radio station, prompting the actors to stop the performance. That’s when things got really ugly: Upon learning that the “invasion” had been a hoax, the frightened crowd transformed into an angry mob—they attacked the building that housed the radio station…and burned it to the ground.

By the time the Ecuadorian army managed to break up the riot, six people had died in the fire and several more had been injured by jumping out of third-floor windows to escape the flames. In the aftermath, the station’s artistic director, Leonardo Paez, was deemed responsible for creating the panic. His misguided sense of “entertainment” brought such an angry backlash from the citizens of Quito that Paez was forced to change his name and flee the country. He never returned.

“No one would have believed…”

—
opening line from
The War of the Worlds

Every language has colorful expressions that sound normal to a person who uses them every day, but can seem strange when translated into another language. Here are some common French idioms translated into English
.

Translation:
“Lower the arms”

Meaning:
Throw in the towel

Translation:
“Good in flesh”

Meaning:
Fat

Translation:
“Shaving brush”

Meaning:
A nerd

Translation:
“As a wolf steps”

Meaning:
Quickly

Translation:
“Have antennae”

Meaning:
Have a sixth sense

Translation:
“To have the cockroach”

Meaning:
To be depressed

Translation:
“To break sugar on somebody’s back”

Meaning:
To talk about someone behind their back

Translation:
“The back teeth are swimming in food”

Meaning:
I’m full

Translation:
“Break the pipe”

Meaning:
Kick the bucket

Translation:
“Between four eyes”

Meaning:
Just between us

Translation:
“Make a white cabbage”

Meaning:
Draw a blank

Translation:
“Tune your violins”

Meaning:
Get your story straight

Translation:
“To walk next to your shoes”

Meaning:
To be out of it

Ever seen the Harlem Globetrotters play? Millions have. With tricks, acrobatics, and amazing basketball skills, they turned sports into entertainment
.

• The team began in 1926 as an independent touring team called the Savoy Big Five, named after a Chicago district.

• For their first game, the team wore jerseys that read “New York” because owner Abe Saperstein figured people would believe they were world-class athletes if they were from New York.

• They were renamed the Harlem Globetrotters in 1929—Harlem because most of the team was African American, Globetrotters to create the (false) image of “experience.”

• By 1940 they’d played 2,000 games and dominated whatever team they played, including high-school teams, college teams, and semipro squads. Their record that season: 159–8.

• One night in 1939, the Globetrotters were leading their opponent 112 to 5. The crowd was bored, so Globetrotter Inman Jackson started fooling around on the court, doing finger rolls, taking (and making) full and half-court shots, shooting from under his leg, and throwing crazy passes to his teammates. The crowd loved it. Saperstein told the team to do that every night.