Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (13 page)

Manhole Covers of Los Angeles,
by Robert and Mimi Melnick (1974)

The History and Romance of Elastic Webbing Since the Dawn of Time,
by Clifford A. Richmond (no date given)

Frog Raising for Pleasure and Profit,
by Dr. Albert Broel (1950)

Eat Your House: Art Eco Quide to Self-Sufficiency,
by Frederic Hobbs (1981)

The Urine Dance of the Zuni Indians of New Mexico
, by Captain John G. Bourke (1885)

Constipation and Our Civilization,
by James Charles Thomson (1943)

Harnessing the Earthworm
, by Thomas J. Barrett (1949)

The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives
, Anon. (1900)

Swine
Judging for Beginners
, Joel Simmonds Coffey (1915)

Fish Who Answer the Telephone,
by Yuri Petrovich Frolov (1937)

Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice
, University of Tokyo (1978)

The Art of Faking Exhibition Poultry,
by George Riley Scott (1934)

Teach Yourself Alcoholism,
by Meier Glatt (1975)

Grow Your Own Hair,
by Ron MacLaren (1947)

Malcolm Forbes wrote a fascinating book about the deaths of famous people. Here are a few of the stories he found.

B
ENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Claim to Fame:
American statesman

How He Died:
Complications from sitting in front of an open window

Postmortem:
Franklin was a big believer in fresh air, even in the middle of winter. He slept with the windows open year-round and, as he wrote, “I rise almost every morning and sit in my chamber without any clothes whatever, half an hour or an hour, according to the season.” In April 1790, Franklin, 84, developed an abscess in his lungs, which his doctor blamed on too many hours spent sitting at the open window. The abscess burst on the 17th, sending him into a coma. He died a few hours later.

JOSEPH STALIN

Claim to Fame:
Soviet dictator, 1929-1953

How He Died:
Stroke

Postmortem:
Stalin, who had murdered tens of millions of his own country people, may have been the last victim of his own reign of terror. On the evening of March 1,1953, Stalin, 74, stayed up drinking with his cronies until 4:00 a.m. His normal habit was to rise again around noon, but that day he didn’t.

As the hours passed and Stalin did not emerge from his private quarters, his aides began to panic. They didn’t want to risk his wrath, but they were worried. At 10:30 p.m., they finally worked up the nerve to enter his apartments, where they found him sprawled on his living room floor, paralyzed by a stroke and unable to speak. The terrorized aides still did not know what to do…so they didn’t call for the Kremlin doctors until 8:30 a.m. the following morning. By then it was too late: according to Stalin’s daughter Svetlana, the dictator “died a difficult and terrible death” four days later.

KING GEORGE V

Claim to Fame:
King of England, grandfather of Queen Elizabeth

How He Died:
Euthanized with morphine and cocaine…to meet a newspaper deadline

Postmortem:
The king, a heavy smoker, was in the final stages of lung disease on January 20, 1936. His death was imminent: the date of the State Funeral had been set, and the
London Times
had been instructed to hold the presses—a death announcement would be coming soon. “That night, however, the old king lingered on,” Sarah Bradford writes in
The Reluctant King,
and the king’s doctor, Lord Dawson,

      
seeing that his condition of “stupor and coma” might last for many hours and could easily disrupt all arrangements, therefore “decided to determine the end”…Dawson later admitted that the moment of the King’s death was timed for its announcement to be made in the respectable morning papers, and the
Times
in particular, rather than “the less appropriate evening journals.”

The king’s “last words” as reported to the media: “How is the Empire?” His actual last words: “Goddamn you!”

DIAMOND JIM BRADY

Claim to Fame:
Turn-of-the-century millionaire, collector of fine gems (hence the nickname), one of the world’s all-time great eaters

How He Died:
He ate himself to death. A typical day started with a breakfast of steak, eggs, cornbread, muffins, pancakes, pork chops, fried potatoes, and hominy, washed down with a gallon or more of orange juice. Breakfast was followed with snacks at 11:30, lunch at 12:30, and afternoon tea; all of which involved enormous quantities of food (but no alcohol—Diamond Jim didn’t drink). Dinner often consisted of 2 or 3 dozen oysters, 6 crabs, 2 bowls of turtle soup, 7 lobsters, 2 ducks, 2 servings of turtle meat, plus steak, vegetables, a full platter of pastries, and a 2-pound box of chocolate.

Postmortem:
When Brady suffered an attack of gallstones in 1912, his surgeons opened him up and found that his stomach was six times normal size and covered in so many layers of fat they couldn’t complete the surgery. Diamond Jim ignored their advice to cut back, yet hung on another five years—albeit in considerable pain from diabetes, bad kidneys, stomach ulcers, and heart problems. He died of a heart attack in 1917, at the age of 61.

A democracy is only as weird as the people who participate in it—and you know what that means: anything can happen in an election. Here’s proof.

A
BSENTEE BALLOT

WESTMORELAND, KAN.—“What if they held an election and nobody came? It happened in Pottawatomie County. Nobody, not even the candidate, showed up to vote in the Rock Creek School Board election Tuesday. ‘I don’t understand it,’ County Clerk Susan Figge said Wednesday. ‘I really don’t.’ Three hundred, twenty-seven people were eligible to vote, but none showed up—not even the candidate, Mike Sotelo, who was running unopposed.” The school board wound up appointing a new member themselves.

—Associated Press,
April 1997

ELECTING A CORPSE

“A dead man was elected mayor of a small town in Colorado in 1983. The voters of Ward, population 125, elected as the mayor of this old mining town, a resident who died a week before the election. Some of the voters were undoubtedly paying tribute to the man and the community, for as one resident quipped, ‘Ward’s a ghost town, and we decided to elect a dead man to represent the silent majority.’ But not everyone shared this sentiment; another voter was heard to say, ‘When he won, I just about died.’”

—The Daily Planet Almanac
, 1985

ELECTION FRAUD?

YPSILANTI, MICH.—“When City Councilman Geoffrey Rose turned over a voter list to a college freshman to help get out the vote, it didn’t occur to him to ask the kid whom he was getting out the vote for. It turns out, the 18-year-old Eastern Michigan University student was looking out for No. 1.” Instead of encouraging voters to cast their ballots for Rose, Frank Houston went door to door urging people to write in
his
name. And he won.

“Rose, who thought he was running unopposed in Monday’s primary, said: ‘Frank is 18 years old, and he’s already acting like what most people in the country can’t stand in elected officials.’ Houston, who’s thinking about majoring in political science, said he didn’t lie to Rose. ‘All I ever said was that I was going to get people to vote,’ he told reporters.

—Christian Science Monitor,
April 1994

TIE VOTE

NOV. 14,1994—“In Rice, Minnesota, Virgil Nelson and Mitch Fiedler, who tied 90 to 90 in the November 1994 election for a city council seat, settled the race by drawing cards. On the first try, both drew eights, and on the second, both drew aces. Then Nelson drew a seven, and Fiedler drew an eight for the victory.”

—News of the Weird

AND ELSEWHERE…

• COPENHAGEN, DENMARK—“Danish comedian Jacob Haugaard, promising better weather, shorter lines, and the right of men to be impotent, got the shock of his life by being elected to parliament in a general election. A stunned Haugaard, the first independent member of parliament elected in Denmark, told crowds of reporters: ‘It was all a practical joke, honestly.’ He won with 23,211 votes after spending his official campaign money on free hot dogs and beer for voters and providing kettles for old age pensioners.”

—Reuters
, September 1996

• “In Britain’s April elections, the usual fringe parties were in evidence—such as the Blackhaired, Medium-Build Caucasian Party—but the longest-standing alternative, the Monster Raving Loony Party, ran the most candidates. Its main platform this year was to tow Britain 500 miles into the Mediterranean Sea to improve the country’s climate. (Other years, platforms have included setting accountants in concrete and using them as traffic barriers, and putting all joggers on a giant treadmill to generate electricity.)

“Fifty other MRLP candidates made proposals such as requiring dogs to eat phosphorescent food, so pedestrians could more easily avoid stepping in their poops.”

—“The Edge” in
The Oregonian,
May 1997

Do the recipes they serve at your local Chinese restaurant really come from China? Don’t bet on it. Here are a few food facts to munch on.

T
oday, Chinese Americans make up less than 1% of the U.S. population, but roughly a third of all ethnic restaurants in the U.S. are “Chinese,” and every supermarket carries a line of “Chinese” food.

NEW-FANGLED FOOD

It started with the Gold Rush of 1849. As thousands of “Forty-Niners” streamed into California in search of gold, whole boomtowns—including a tent city named San Francisco—sprang up to supply their needs.

• One merchant who set up shop in San Francisco was a Chinese American named Norman Asing (described by one historian as a “cadaverous but keen old fellow” with a long ponytail and stovepipe hat). He opened a restaurant called, “The Macao and Woosung” and charged $1 for an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet.

• It was the first Chinese restaurant on U.S. territory, and it was a hit with miners and other San Franciscans. Asing’s success inspired dozens of other Chinese immigrants to open restaurants, called “chow chows.”

MADE IN CANTON

Over the next three decades, hundreds of thousands of Chinese migrated to the United States. By 1882—when Congress curtailed Chinese immigration—there were more than 300,000 Chinese nationals living on the West Coast.

• Most came from Kwangtung Province, whose capital city was Canton. So most Chinese restaurants served Cantonese-style food.

• In Cantonese cuisine, very little goes to waste: nearly every part of an animal that can be eaten is used in one dish or another.

• So, says John Mariani in
America Eats Out
, “‘Going for Chinese’ was considered adventurous eating for most white Americans at the turn of the century.” Typically, one food critic who ate in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the late 1800s wrote that he was served

      
Pale cakes with a waxen look, full of [strange] meats…Then giblets of you-never-know-what, maybe gizzards…perhaps toes.

• “Before long, however,” Mariani writes, “Chinese cooks learned how to modify their dishes to make them more palatable to a wider American audience.” The result: Chinese-American cuisine, food that looked and tasted “Chinese,” but was actually invented in the U.S. and was unknown in China. Some examples:

•
Chop Suey.
No one knows for sure when it was invented, or how it got its name. The likely start: In 1850 a bunch of hungry miners busted their way into a chow-chow late at night and demanded to be fed. The chef just stirred all the table scraps and leftovers he could find into a big mess and served it. The miners loved it. When they asked what it was, the chef replied, “c
hop sui,”
which means “garbage bits” in Cantonese. The dish remained virtually unheard of in China until after World War II; today, it’s advertised there as
American
cuisine.

•
Chow Mein.
A mixture of noodles and Chinese vegetables, probably served to railroad crews in the 1850s. From a Mandarin dialect word that means “fried noodles.”