Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Golden Plunger Awards (20 page)

1.
Porta-potty scrubber
2.
Earthworm farmer
3.
Roller coaster inspector
4.
Wine cave digger
5.
Alligator egg collector
6.
Dysentery stool sample analyzer
7.
Armpit sniffer (for deodorant companies)
8.
Jaw massage therapist
9.
Ice cream taster
10.
Orangutan pee collector
11.
Easter Bunny

Russia’s Amber Room

It’s been called the “most valuable missing artwork in the world” and the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” and it’s worth more than $250 million. But after World War II, Russia’s Amber Room—a room decorated entirely with amber that dated back to the days of Peter the Great—vanished, and people around the world have been looking for it ever since.

In 1701, the first king of Prussia, Friedrich I, hired craftsmen to panel his study in amber, the fossilized resin of ancient trees. It was completed in 1713, the same year the king died. Three years later, Friedrich Wilhem I dismantled his father’s showpiece room and gave it to Czar Peter the Great to cement a new alliance. The room traveled to St. Petersburg in 18 large boxes and was initially displayed as part of an art collection . . . until 1755 when Peter’s daughter, Czarina Elisabeth, decided to have the room installed in St. Catharine’s Palace in Pushkin (the Russian royals’ summer home).

The part of the palace where Elisabeth wanted to set up the Amber Room, though, was larger than Friedrich’s original study. So Russian artisans added additional jewel-encrusted panels. These included four Florentine mosaics fashioned from gems like
jasper, marble, jade, onyx, and quartz. Also among the furnishings were display cases containing precious amber objects like chess sets, candlesticks, and jewel boxes.

When Catherine the Great came to power in 1762, she ordered even more improvements and had the room moved a second time to her new summer home outside St. Petersburg. The job was finally complete in 1770, and the Amber Room was a marvel. It included more than 100,000 pieces of carved amber paneling that covered about 592 square feet. Catherine showed the room off by installing 565 candles to illuminate its six tons of amber, semiprecious stones, gold leaf, and silver.

The room stayed at Catherine’s palace until 1941, when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union and the Amber Room went missing. How does an entire room simply vanish?

As the Nazis advanced, the Soviets tried to hide the amber panels by wallpapering over them. (First, they tried to disassemble the room but couldn’t figure out how to take it apart without the amber crumbling.) The Nazis easily uncovered the ruse, tore down the room (they didn’t care so much about the crumbling stones), and shipped it to Germany. Then they set it up at their own museum in Königsberg, where it was on display for two years.

In 1943, the Americans bombed the town of Königsberg, and no one is sure if the Germans got the room hidden away before the bombs razed the museum or not. Supposedly, the museum’s director had been warned of the raid and was told to save the amber, but there’s no evidence that he actually did. And since then, the Amber Room has been missing.

The missing room, though, and all of the gems, jewels, and other treasures that went along with it have inspired many theories as to its fate:

In February 2008, however, treasure hunters started digging up an abandoned mine in the German town of Deutschneudorf. They looked there on a tip from the son of a former German pilot who said that the Nazis had stashed art, gold, and silver there when they realized they were going to lose the war.

Further investigation led authorities to believe that the underground location might contain parts of the famous Amber Room, but because of possible booby traps and adjoining mines, they haven’t yet been able to enter the site to find out what’s in it. If the material below ground does turn out to be surviving relics of the Amber Room, Deutschneudorf’s mayor Hans-Peter Ulstein says they’ll be returned to Russia.

Whether or not those finds prove to be the original Amber Room, the Russians unveiled a reconstructed Amber Room in 2003. They government had been working on the new room since 1979, and it was finally dedicated to mark the 300-year anniversary of the original room. It took six tons of Baltic amber and $11 million to re-create the Amber Room, and it’s on display in the town of Pushkin outside of St. Petersburg.

“Looking out on these tuxedos tonight, it’s like seeing the movie again. Thank you for this homage.”

Envirolet Composting Toilets

They say if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. Here at the BRI, we feel obligated to beat a path to the door of someone who builds a better toilet. It takes a special kind of talent to improve on something so popular and widely used. When we noticed someone had made an improvement in composting toilets, we knew we had to give him a thumbs-up for doing the green thing.

Composting takes organic waste (manure, plant trimmings, leftover food, things like that) and lets it break down over time. When added to soil, it can add nutrients back into the environment and work as a sustainable fertilizer for new plant growth and vegetation. Composting saves a lot of material from going to landfills, too. It’s a win-win all around for the environment.

It’s easy enough, and human beings have been doing it for thousands of years. But when it comes to adding human waste to the compost pile, most people turn up their noses. Not so with Envirolet Composting Toilets. It’s sometimes easier to use a composting system in a cabin or a remote place that doesn’t have access to plumbing, which these toilets work well for, but Envirolet has broken into the home bathroom market. In a good home system, a holding tank for the waste is kept somewhere remote from the toilet itself. And in that special holding tank, the composting magic begins.

Most of the waste people generate is water—up to 90 percent, in fact. Composting toilets let that water evaporate back into the air as the . . . ahem . . . deposits that people make in the toilet are collected in a special aeration basket. The obvious concern here is smell—and in this case, fans, microbes, and a little bit of peat moss do the dirty work of eliminating odor.

For home use, the baskets need to be placed in a waste treatment container, and most people don’t want that in the bathroom. Outside or in the basement is better (the principle is the same as home plumbing; it’s just that the journey is shorter—instead of going to the main collection spot, the waste goes into the holding tank). The system takes care of the rest of the compost creation process. You only have to empty it out once a year too.

The Envirolet toilet systems are designed to use either no water or very little of it, depending on the model. A typical regular toilet uses about three gallons of water every time it’s flushed; low-flow toilets use about half that. That’s a lot of water being wasted on waste. Composting is a huge benefit to the environment, too, especially when yard waste and disposed food products are added in. The Environmental Protection Agency praises composting for helping regenerate soil, suppressing plant diseases, helping create larger crop yields, and reducing the need for water, fertilizers, and pesticides. Waste not, want not, we say.

Pia Zadora was a child actress, appearing in 1964’s
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
. . . but then nothing. She didn’t get another role until 1982, when she starred in
Butterfly
, a drama in which Zadora’s character has a romantic relationship with her father. The movie was financed by Zadora’s husband, Israeli businessman Meshulam Riklis, and was a critical and commercial flop. Zadora especially earned poor reviews. Nevertheless, she won a Golden Globe Award for Best New Star of the Year. But that might have had something to do with the lavish trips Riklis gave members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the Golden Globes’ voting body.

Toilet Paper Wedding Gowns
and Duct Tape Prom Dresses

The idea of making something from nothing springs from that all-American pioneer spirit: if you can make a doll from a corncob or build a house out of sod and a few boards, you can do anything! So instead of purchasing expensive off-the-rack garments, these people are using their ingenuity and skills to create elaborate and intricate garments out of the most mundane and humble materials.

The women behind the Web site Cheap Chic Weddings wanted to help budget-conscious brides (and publicize their site). So in 2005, they launched the first “Toilet Paper Wedding Gown Competition.”