Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (6 page)

The Truth:
The story was the work of the
Territorial Enterprise’s
local editor, Samuel Clemens (later known by his pen name, Mark Twain). Clemens figured people would know it was a hoax by the description of the stone man’s hand positions. [Uncle John’s note: Try doing it yourself.] But he was wrong. “I really had no desire to deceive anybody,” he explained later. “I depended on the way the petrified man was sitting to explain to the public that he was a swindle….[It was] a delicate, a very delicate satire. But maybe it was altogether too delicate, for nobody ever perceived the satire part of it at all.”

NOISY GHOST HAUNTS SAN DIEGO BANK BUILDING!

(The San Diego Metropolitan,
1987)

The Story:
The article claimed that the Great American Bank Building, one of San Diego’s best-known landmarks, was plagued by mysterious footsteps heard late at night, creepy voices, ghost-like images materializing out of thin air; just about all of the classic ghost clichés. The article even claimed the ghost or ghosts had reduced janitorial costs 25% by helping the building’s custodians do the vacuuming. The article included a photo of the ghost, and quoted a “parapsychologist” calling it “one of the finest examples of spiritual photography I’ve ever seen.”

The Reaction:
The public took the story seriously, and when the tenants of the Great American Bank Building learned of the incidents, they began reporting their own sightings—including power failures, carpeting that had been “mysteriously vacuumed,” and cleaning equipment that moved from one floor to another; one electrician even reported seeing his tools float in midair and ghosts walking in the hallway.

The Truth:
The article was the brainchild of
Metropolitan
publisher Sean Patrick Reily, who later admitted it had been inspired by Mark Twain’s “petrified man” work.

One of Uncle John’s bathroom stalwarts is
Stabbed with a Wedge of Cheese,
by Charles Downey. There’s a lot of offbeat stuff in
it,
including info on these festivals.

T
HE ANNUAL FIRE ANT FESTIVAL

Location:
Marshall, Texas

Background:
Fire ants are red ants that swarm and bite—a real problem in South Texas. People in Marshall decided that since they couldn’t get rid of the ants, they might as well have some fun with them.

Special Events:
Fire Ant Call, Fire Ant Roundup, and a Fire Ant Chili Cookoff in which entrants must certify in writing that their fixin’s contain at least one fire ant. The ending to the festivities is the Fire Ant Stomp—not an attempt to squash the ants, but an old-fashioned street dance.

THE INTERNATIONAL STRANGE MUSIC FESTIVAL

Location:
Olive Hill, Kentucky

Background:
Founded to honor people who make music from non-musical items.

Special Events:
Every act is a special event. Performers have included:

• A Japanese trio playing “My Old Kentucky Home” on a table (upside down, strung like a cello), tea pot (a wind instrument), and assorted pots and pans (bongo drums)

• A 15-piece orchestra of automobile horns

• A seven-foot slide whistle requiring three people to operate it

• A “Graduated Clanger”—a system of ever-smaller fire alarm bells, played like a xylophone

THE ANNUAL CHICKEN SHOW

Location:
Wayne, Nebraska

Background:
Held the second Saturday in July, featuring a crowing contest for roosters, a free omelet feed for humans, and a chicken-flying meet, fully sanctioned by the International Chicken Flying Association.

Special Events:
A “Most Beautiful Beak” contest, chicken bingo, and an egg drop (participants risk egg-on-the-face by trying to catch a raw egg dropped from a fully extended cherry picker). The National Cluck-Off selects the person with the most lifelike cluck and most believable crow. Another contest offers prizes to the man and woman who sport the most chicken-like legs.

THE WORLD GRITS FESTIVAL

Location:
St. George, South Carolina

Background:
World’s only celebration honoring the South’s staple food. Special grits dishes are offered for all meals of the day. Also featured are a grits mill, a grits-eating contest, and a grits cooking contest. The event was born when someone discovered that the 2,300 citizens of St. George went through about 1,800 pounds of grits a week.

Special Events:
“The Roll-in-Grits Contest.” A kids’ wading pool is filled with hot water and several hundred pounds of grits, then stirred with a canoe paddle till done. Each contestant: 1) weighs in, 2) gets in the pool and wallows in it for seven seconds, 3) gets out and weighs in again. The object: To see how many pounds of grits can stick to your body. All-time winner had 26 pounds stuck to him.

THE UGLY PICKUP PARADE AND CONTEST

Location:
Chadron, Nebraska

Background:
In 1987, newspaper columnist Les Mann wrote an homage to his junker 1974 pickup, “Black Beauty,” claiming it was the ugliest truck on the planet. Irate ugly-truck owners wrote in, saying they could top him. So the first Ugly Truck Contest was born.

Special Events:
Experts pick the Ugly Pickup of the Year. An Ugly Pickup Queen leads the three-block parade through town. Official rules: Trucks have to be street-legal, and over a decade old. They have to be able to move under their own power; a majority of the surface area has to be rust and dents; and, most important, they’ve got to have a good Ugly Truck name. Contestants get extra points for something
especially
ugly on their truck.

People have always been fascinated by dreams. Where do they come from? What do they mean? D.H. Lawrence put it perfectly when he said, “I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts or my thoughts are the result of my dreams.” On occasion, art, music, and even discoveries and inventions have resulted directly from information received in a dream. Here are some examples.

T
HE SEWING MACHINE

Elias Howe had been trying to invent a practical lock-stitch sewing machine for years, but had been unsuccessful. One night in the 1840s, he had a nightmare in which he was captured by a primitive tribe who were threatening to kill him with their spears. Curiously, all the spears had holes in them at the pointed ends. When Howe woke up, he realized that a needle with a hole at its tip—rather than at the base or middle (which is what he’d been working with)—was the solution to his problem.

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE

Since childhood, novelist Robert Louis Stevenson had always remembered his dreams and believed that they gave him inspiration for his writing. In 1884, he was in dire need of money and was trying to come up with a book. He had already spent two days racking his brains for a new plot when he had a nightmare about a man with a dual personality. In the dream, “Mr. Hyde” was being pursued for a crime he’d committed; he took a strange powder and changed into someone else as his pursuers watched. Stevenson screamed in his sleep, and his wife woke him. The next morning he began writing down
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

INSULIN

Frederick Banting, a Canadian doctor, had been doing research into the cause of diabetes, but had not come close to a cure. One night he had a strange dream. When he awoke, he quickly wrote down a few words that he remembered: “Tie up the duct of the pancreas of a dog…wait for the glands to shrivel up…then cut it out, wash it…and filter the precipitation.” This new approach to extracting the substance led to the isolation of the hormone now known as insulin, which has saved millions of diabetics’ lives. Banting was knighted for his discovery.

LEAD SHOT

James Watt is remembered for inventing the steam engine, but he also came up with the process for making lead shot used in shotguns. This process was revealed to him in a dream. At the time, making the shot was costly and unpredictable—the lead was rolled into sheets by hand, then chopped into bits. Watt had the same dream each night for a week: He was walking along in a heavy rainstorm—but instead of rain, he was being showered with tiny pellets of lead, which he could see rolling around his feet. The dream haunted him; did it mean that molten lead falling through the air would harden into round pellets? He decided to experiment. He melted a few pounds of lead and tossed it out of the tower of a church that had a water-filled moat at its base. When he removed the lead from the water, he found that it
had
hardened into tiny globules. To this day, lead shot is made using this process.

THE BENZENE MOLECULE

Friedrich A. Kekule, a Belgian chemistry professor, had been working for some time to solve the structural riddle of the benzene molecule. One night while working late, he fell asleep on a chair and dreamed of atoms dancing before him, forming various patterns and structures. He saw long rows of atoms begin to twist like snakes until one of the snakes seized its own tail and began to whirl in a circle. Kekule woke up “as if by a flash of lightning” and began to work out the meaning of his dream image. His discovery of a closed ring with an atom of carbon and hydrogen at each point of a hexagon revolutionized organic chemistry.

JESUS
(as many people think of Him)

Warner E. Sallman was an illustrator for religious magazines. In 1924 he needed a picture for a deadline the next day, but was coming up blank Finally, he went to bed—then suddenly awoke with “a picture of the Christ in my mind’s eye just as if it were on my drawing board.” He quickly sketched a portrait of Jesus with long brown hair, blue eyes, a neatly trimmed beard, and a beatific look—which has now become the common image of Christ around the world. Since 1940, more than 500 million copies of Sallman’s “Head of Christ” have been sold. It has been reproduced billions of times on calendars, lamps, posters, etc.

Cosmic question: What would Albert Einstein think if he knew we consider his comments great bathroom reading?

“Only two things are infinite, the universe and stupidity—and I’m not sure about the former.”

“God is subtle, but He is not malicious.”

“‘Common sense’ is the set of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.”

“Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.”

“I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.”

“Try not to become a man of success, but rather, a man of value.”

“I experience the greatest degree of pleasure in having contact with works of art. They furnish me with happy feelings of an intensity such as I cannot drive from other realms.”

“To punish me for my contempt for authority, Fate made me an authority myself.”

“Why is it that nobody understands me, and everybody likes me?”

“A life directed chiefly toward fulfillment of personal desires sooner or later
always
leads to bitter disappointment.”

“My political ideal is that of democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual, and no man idolized.”

“Whatever there is of God and goodness in the Universe, it must work itself out and express itself through us. We cannot stand aside and let God do it.”

“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

“I am a deeply religious nonbeliever…This is a somewhat new kind of religion.”

“With fame I become more and more stupid, which of course is a very common phenomenon.”

These are 100% honest-to-goodness headlines. Can you figure out what they were trying to say?

Kids Make Nutritious Snacks

ENRAGED COW INJURES FARMER WITH AXE

Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge

BILKE-A-THON NETS $1,000 FOR ILL BOY

PANDA MATING FAILS; VETERINARIAN TAKES OVER

School taxpayers revolting

Eye Drops Off Shelf

HELICOPTER POWERED BY HUMAN FLIES

Circumcisions Cut Back

POPE TO BE ARRAIGNED FOR ALLEGEDLY BURGLARIZING CLINIC

City wants Dead to pay for cleanup

MOORPARK RESIDENTS ENJOY A COMMUNAL DUMP

Montana Traded to Kansas City