Read Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader (48 page)
• A woman in Newport, Arkansas, was arrested after she pulled a gun on Larry Estes, a preacher who had just started the service in his church. The woman was Tammy Estes, the preacher’s wife. Witnesses later reported that Mrs. Estes was upset over text messages that she’d found from her husband to another woman. After holding Rev. Estes at bay for two hours, she surrendered to police.
• During the 1950s, a couple in Kuligaon, India, had an argument that resulted in the husband moving out of the house…and into a nearby treehouse. As of 2006, the 83-year-old was still living there. “We quarreled over a tiny issue,” his wife told reporters. “I’ve tried to get him to come back, but he has refused all the time.”
• In September 2005, Mark Bridgwood, 49, of Dartmouth, England, noticed a classified advertisement in his local paper for a yacht. It was
his
yacht. His estranged wife, Tracy, was secretly selling it for less than half its $180,000 value. “Any quick cash offer considered,” the ad said. The fuming husband nixed any possible sale by taking an ax to seawater valves under the vessel’s waterline. The 53-foot yacht went down immediately. “It was a beautiful boat,” said Tracy, who works as a waitress. “And he sank it.”
Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and as sweet as love. —Turkish proverb
Every line of work has its own jargon, but corporate lingo—“office speak”—has some of the best (and darkest) euphemisms around. Here’s a brief sampling.
Negative advancement:
Demotion.
Percussive maintenance:
Kicking a machine to get it to work.
Sub-optimal results:
Failure.
Temporarily displaced inventory:
Stolen goods.
Market correction:
The stocks are plummeting.
Opportunity:
Severe problem with no clear solution.
Realigned salaries:
Pay cuts.
Mindsharing:
Brainstorming.
De-layering:
Eliminating middle management.
Treeware:
Paper.
Efficiency expert:
Outsider brought in by a company to decide who should be fired.
Execution excellence:
Success.
Soft restructuring:
Quietly selling off assets to raise cash, while publicly denying that any such action is going on.
V2V:
“Voice to Voice,” or actually speaking with someone.
Enterprise environment:
The office.
Capital preservation:
When a struggling company stops spending money.
Negative cash-flow experience:
The company is losing money.
Structural constraints:
Overhead.
Zero-sum expansion:
An attempt to sell more products or hire more people with no additional resources.
We’re right-sizing:
You’re fired.
We’re de-growing:
You’re fired.
We’re putting you on indefinite idle:
You’re fired.
We’re considering you for vocational relocation:
You’re fired.
He left to pursue other opportunities:
He was fired.
The Japanese word
koroski
means “death induced by overwork.”
BEAUTY SECRETS FROM THE GOOD OLD DAYS
Here’s a beauty tip from Uncle John: If your great-great-great-grandma is still living, don’t ask her for beauty tips. If what we found in these old books is any guide, you’ll probably get some pretty odd advice.
T
o lose weight:
“New York society women usually go upon the milk diet during Lent, as being the most convenient time, and for a week they take nothing into the system but milk. The dose for the milk diet is: Take a glass of milk upon rising, then follow it with a glass every hour all day. Add a pinch of salt if you prefer. The milk will wash all impurities out of the system, and milk taken thusly is not fattening.”
—
The Household Physician
(1905)
Another way to lose weight:
“Keep on bearing children as long and often as possible.”
—
Creative and Sexual Science
(1876)
For wrinkles:
“A wrinkle is like a crinkle in a piece of tissue paper. It is there, but is easily smoothed out. The plaster treatment has been tried with good results: The wrinkle is stretched flat, and slender strips of plaster are applied. When taken off, the wrinkle will be much lighter.”
—
The Household Physician
(1905)
Bathing:
“The vigorous and strong may bathe early in the morning on an empty stomach. The young and weak had better bathe three hours after a meal.”
—
Cassell’s Household Guide
(1880)
“
Bags under the eyes
destroy the beauty of the face. To get rid of these bags, massage persistently, and also reform the diet, for the eyes are particularly the sign of a bad liver. It is good to eat apples, cooked and raw; correct the liver and the eye sacs will disappear.”
—
The Household Physician
(1905)
It’s illegal to clean your car with used underwear in San Francisco.
“Every intelligent dentist knows that the whiter the teeth are,
the sooner and the more certainly they will decay. He also knows that those teeth last the longest and are the most useful, which have a yellowish tint.”
—
Fun Better Than Physic
(1877)
“
To enlarge the bust:
An efficacious, yet safe method to enlarge the bust is a persistent massage with some bland oil, of which coconut or olive oil are good examples.”
—
The Household Physician
(1905)
“
To cure pimples:
Take a fairly full breath and hold it momentarily while contracting the abdominal muscles and straining lightly. This brings a flush to the cheeks and fills the capillaries of the skin, insuring a better skin circulation. Standing on the head will have the same effect as the exercise given, and is worth a try.”
—
Home Health Manual
(1930)
“
Freckled hands
in summer are caused by letting the sun touch the hands immediately after they have been washed. The freckles can be removed with lemon juice followed by cold cream.”
—
The Household Physician
(1905)
“
The very best way of making the hair grow
is to rub paraffin into the roots but, of course, you must be very careful afterwards not to go near a fire or light of any kind.”
—
The Girl’s Own Annual
(1903)
“
Fat faced women
always have small eyes. As the fat increases, the cheeks puff up and the eyes dwindle. Eyes can be made larger if one massages the cheeks until the fat is less noticeable.”
—
The Household Physician
(1905)
To freshen the breath:
“A lump of charcoal held in the mouth two or three times in a week and slowly chewed, has a power to preserve the teeth and purify the breath. Those who are troubled with an offensive breath might chew it very often and swallow it but seldom.”
—
Polite Manual for Young Ladies
(1847)
It’s a jungle out there: Aardvarks have been known to attack and kill lions.
Writing is a profession that requires focus and concentration. Here are a few well-known authors who liked to strip away all distractions—literally—before they got down to work.
V
ICTOR HUGO.
The French novelist who wrote
Les Misérables
and
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
hated the labor of writing and was a great procrastinator. So he came up with a unique way to force himself to work: He handed all of his clothes to his servant, with orders not to give them back until Hugo had completed a full day’s writing.
EDMOND ROSTAND.
The French author of
Cyrano de Bergerac
suffered so many interruptions from visitors that he resorted to working naked in his bathtub to get some privacy.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY.
The American novelist (
For Whom the Bell Tolls
) wrote nude, standing up, with his typewriter at about waist level.
ROBIN MOORE.
In a possible homage to Hemingway, Moore (
The Green Berets
and
The Hunt for Bin Laden
) says he also likes to type his novels while standing in the nude.
JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY.
The American poet had a tendency to drink too much when he wrote. So he had himself locked inside a hotel room, naked, thus thwarting any temptation to stroll out to the bar for a cocktail.
D. H. LAWRENCE.
This British novelist (
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
) liked to climb mulberry trees in the buff and then write when he came back down.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.
According to legend (which he probably helped spread), the statesman and author of
Poor Richard’s Almanack
began each day by taking an “air bath”—sitting naked for hours in an extremely cold room—while he wrote.
Whole milk contains only 4% fat by weight—but 48% by calories.
The latest in scams, frauds, cons, and quacks brought to you by
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader,
the book that can spin straw into gold, cure the common cold, and prevent you from getting old.
T
HIS ISN’T HOT, IS IT?
A 42-year-old woman in South Bend, Indiana, called police after being sold a bogus flat-screen television. The woman had been approached by a man on the street about a great deal on the TV: just $500. When she said she couldn’t afford that, the price got even better: $300. The woman bought the set, which was bubble-wrapped, had Wal-Mart stickers on it, and came with a remote control, and happily took it home. But when she opened it she discovered it wasn’t a flat-screen television at all—it was an oven door. Police said the scam explained the recent theft of oven doors from several abandoned properties. (The suspect was arrested two months later…with an oven door in his truck.)
FOWL PLAY
Transportation authorities in New Zealand uncovered an automobile-registration scam after a woman called a radio station to brag about it. She told the hosts that she had registered her car as a “noncommercial hearse” for carrying dead animals, which allowed her to pay only $36 instead of the normal $113. The dead animals she was transporting: chickens—frozen ones from the supermarket. A search quickly discovered 40 more people using the scheme, with possibly hundreds more to come. Land Transport spokesman Andy Knackstedt said, “The definition of a hearse is a vehicle used to convey coffins, not to convey groceries.”
MICROSPUD, INC.
In 2004 a man in the German city of Kaiserslautern angrily returned a computer to the store where he had just purchased it, claiming to have been taken in a scam. The computer’s insides, he showed them, were full of potatoes, not computer parts. The store apologized and gave the man another computer. Turns out he was the scamm
er
, not the scam
ee
. He almost got away with it, too.
What happened to Pluto? Walt Disney owned a poodle named Lady.
Store security called police when the man returned the second computer—again filled with potatoes—and said he didn’t need the computer anymore, he wanted a cash refund. The man was arrested and charged with fraud.
JUST A PHONE CALL AWAY
Hideto Tomabechi became famous in Japan as the man who “deprogrammed” brainwashed members of the AUM Shinrikyo cult in the 1990s. In 2004 he became famous again when he developed a cell phone ring tone…that increases breast size. Tomabechi claimed the song uses sounds that “make the brain and body move unconsciously” and called it “positive brainwashing.” While that might seem so ludicrous that nobody would believe it, the tune, “Rockmelon,” was purchased and downloaded 10,000 times in its first week alone. “We offer loads of
chakumero
[ringtones] at 300 yen [$2.60] a month,” said a spokesman for Media Chic, the company selling the tune. “And the tune promising huge breasts would have to be in our top ten.” Tomabechi was so pleased with the results that he’s developing ringtones to cure baldness, improve memory, attract mates, and help people give up smoking.
THEY RECEIVED STIFF PENALTIES
In 2003 a hospital employee in Harare, Zimbabwe, noticed a mortician entering the basement morgue carrying a coffin that had earlier been sent out for a funeral with a body in it. The employee notified authorities, and an investigation revealed that the mortician and an assistant had been renting corpses out to people…so they could cut in front of the long lines at gas stations. Gasoline is in short supply and extremely expensive in Harare, and most stations give priority to people with burial orders (which the duo also provided) and corpses. The cadaver dealers were arrested and charged with violating dead bodies.
* * *
“If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: PRESIDENT CAN’T SWIM.”