Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Zipper Accidents (29 page)

O
n the day it was set to air the seventh-season finale of
Top Chef
, Bravo posted on its website a clip featuring a reunion of that season’s contestants. It was meant to go up after the show, however, as the clip opens with host Andy Cohen saying, “Before we get into anything, we have to congratulate the winner of
Top Chef: D.C.
, Kevin.” Bravo pulled the video a few hours later, but it was too late, and the season-ruining scoop had already spread around the Internet.

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In 2011, the second season of AMC’s zombie drama
The Walking Dead
featured a shocking twist in its second-to-last episode. (Shane, Sheriff Grimes’s best friend and an increasingly loose cannon, attempts to kill Grimes and take control over the group of survivors, forcing Grimes to kill Shane, who becomes a zombie soon thereafter and is then killed.) The show sells a ton of DVD sets, so AMC was already taking orders for Season 2 before the season was done airing. The fate of Shane had not yet been aired when
The Walking Dead
ad on AMC’s site appeared, listing special features such as a look at “Shane’s last episode.”

N
ot so long ago, the telegraph (a coded message of electrical pulses over a charged wire) was the dominant and only quick form of telecommunication. More than 50 different telegraph companies were operating within the U.S. by 1851, the year the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company was founded. A decade later, only a handful were left, among them the New York and Mississippi company under its new name, Western Union Telegraph Company.

In the 1870s, another major telecommunications innovation occurred: Alexander Graham Bell drew up plans for a new technology he called a “harmonic telegraph,” and his company, the Volta Laboratory, began filing patents. As the idea evolved, Bell began to consider a device that could transmit the human voice, though he couldn’t figure out how he would pull off such a feat. Luckily for Bell, patent law at the time allowed him to file for an invention for which there was not yet a working model. So Bell received a patent for the “telephone,” which he technically hadn’t invented yet. And he was granted it just before a competitor, Elisha Gray, filed his own notice of invention for a telephone.

On March 10, 1876, he succeeded in transmitting speech, one week after his patent had been
granted. Unfortunately, he used a technology described not in his application, but in Gray’s. Seeing the long legal battles ahead, and fearing for the future of an invention that still wasn’t complete, Bell offered to sell the telephone patents to Western Union—a company that at the time was worth tens of millions of dollars—for $100,000. A Western Union memo shows the logic of Western Union as it turned down Bell:

The Telephone purports to transmit the speaking voice over telegraph wires. We found that the voice is very weak and indistinct, and grows even weaker when long wires are used between the transmitter and receiver. Technically, we do not see that this device will be ever capable of sending recognizable speech over a distance of several miles. This device is inherently of no use to us. We do not recommend its purchase.

It wasn’t long before telegraphs were being removed from locations all over the country to make way for telephones. Western Union wasn’t immediately destroyed by the loss of the opportunity to rule the world’s communications systems. It continued in business, offering the first charge card for consumers in 1914, as well as the first candygrams in the 1960s, and even satellites in the 1970s. But mounting debts and falling profits led the company to begin divesting its telecommunications-based assets starting in the 1980s. In February 2006, the company announced the end of its telegram services.

D
aniel Blackner is a performance artist. He’s also a little person, and he is best known as playing “Captain Dan the Demon Dwarf” in a show called Circus of Horrors at the annual Edinburgh Fringe Festival of bizarre and avant-garde performances. During his 2007 performance, Blackner brought a vacuum cleaner onto the stage…attached to his penis. But the safe adhesive connecting man to machine came loose, so, thinking quickly, Blackner affixed the vacuum to his genitals with extra-strong glue. He got stuck. He was taken to a hospital, where it took nurses an hour to free him.

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In 2008 a building contractor from Poland (unnamed in reports) was working in a hospital when he decided he needed to clean his underpants. So he went into the empty hospital cafeteria, lowered his pants, and went about cleaning his underwear…with a vacuum cleaner. A security guard caught him in the act with the cleaning machine, which was a “Henry Hoover,” a vacuum with a huge, smiling face painted on its front and a hose for a nose. The contractor was asked to leave the premises immediately (and to leave the vacuum).

A
Manhattan lawyer named Saul Finkelstein made an unsettling discovery during New York City’s 2012 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade: Some of the pieces of confetti had decipherable words and numbers on them—the full names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, and banking information of detectives from the Nassau County Police Department (NCPD), which serves nearby Long Island. Finkelstein even found strips of paper with legible details about presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s motorcade (which had been on Long Island a month earlier). Finkelstein and his son brought several handfuls of the confetti home and alerted the NCPD, who sent over an officer to take it away. The police promised to investigate the matter.

But what’s to investigate? There are two ways to put documents into a shredder: the long way and the short way. Do it the long way, and the shredder shreds the paper perpendicular to the text lines, thus cutting it up into little, illegible pieces. But if the documents are loaded into the shredder the other way, the cuts are parallel, leading to entire lines of text being readable.

Even more curious: How did Macy’s, the department store that runs the parade, obtain the sensitive confetti from a police department in
another city? A Macy’s spokesperson said they didn’t—they use only “commercially manufactured, multi-colored confetti, not shredded, homemade, or printed paper of any kind.” But spectators often “bring their own confetti.” So that means someone who works at the NCPD had brought bagfuls of improperly shredded documents to America’s most popular parade. An internal investigation soon revealed the two officers who had brought the shreds, and they were reprimanded.

THE CAMERA IS ON

In October 2009, Australian ABC2 news anchor Virginia Trioli was in the middle of a program when she cut to an interview she had taped earlier with an Australian politician, Barnaby Joyce. While the segment played Trioli joked with someone in the studio, making a face, along with the universally understood circle movement of a finger at the side of her head—implying that Mr. Joyce was “crazy.” And…the camera cut away from the segment and back to her just as she was making the gestures. Trioli abruptly stopped what she doing, went back to her serious news face, and continued the broadcast. Trioli was forced to make a shamefaced on-air apology to viewers the next day.

S
tiv Bators was a major star in the late ’70s punk rock scene as the front man of the Dead Boys. After playing a murderous juvenile delinquent in John Waters’s cult comedy
Polyester
, Bators went to England to form the goth rock band the Lords of the New Church. Bators’s stage antics were brutal. He often stuck his head inside the bass drum during loud jams. One time, he banged his head on an amplifier so hard he cracked his skull. (After receiving a few stitches, he was back onstage for the second set.) Another time, Bators tossed his microphone cord over a rafter above the stage, wrapped it around his neck, and started pulling himself up. Some of the crowd members then “helped” him by pulling on the cord even more. Seeing the look of panic in Bators’s eyes, his bandmates quickly freed him, but he wasn’t breathing. Paramedics actually pronounced him dead before they were able to revive him.