Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (37 page)
Read Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
BUT SERIOUSLY
Six months after the USSR launched Sputnik,
San Francisco Chronicle
columnist Herb Caen gave the Beats their most famous nickname when he called them
beatniks
in a 1958 column. “I made fun of the Beats because they took themselves so seriously,” he remembered. “I had a drink with Allen Ginsberg one night at Vesuvio and we walked across the street to Tosca. He was barefoot. The uptight Italian who owned the place kicked him out. ‘But I’m Allen Ginsberg,’ he shouted. The guy had never heard of him.”
Americans spend $50 billion a year on pet food—as much as they spend on dental care.
Is there
is
a doctor in the house? Yes, but he’s not real
.
D
R. EMMETT BROWN:
Inventor of the flux capacitor, which he used to travel through time. In the
Back to the Future
movies he was portrayed by Christopher Lloyd, who got the role when John Lithgow became unavailable.
DR. JOHN CARPENTER:
Elvis Presley’s character in 1969’s
Change of Habit,
the last in the long string of Presley’s musical comedies. While serving at an inner-city health clinic, Dr. Carpenter falls in love with a co-worker (Mary Tyler Moore). Elvis doesn’t get the girl this time, because Moore’s character is a nun. (At least he gets to sing “Rubberneckin’.”)
DR. DEMENTO:
The alter ego of disc jockey Barret Hansen. From 1970 to 2010, he hosted a syndicated radio show focusing on novelty songs. Claim to fame: He discovered “Weird Al” Yankovic in the late ’70s when Yankovic, then an unknown college senior, started sending homemade tapes of his song parodies to the show.
DR. MARK GREENE:
The main character of
ER
(played by Anthony Edwards), from its first season in 1994 until 2002. He was a divorced dad trying to raise a daughter while working his residency as an emergency room doctor. The character died from a brain tumor in season 8, after Edwards, one of the highest-paid stars in TV history, decided to leave the show.
DR. HENRY HIGGINS:
In George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play
Pygmalion,
and in the Broadway musical adaptation
My Fair Lady,
the professor of phonetics bets his colleague Col. Pickering that he can turn a rough-around-the-edges Cockney flower girl into a refined, proper lady. Dr. Higgins does, but also falls in love with her. He winds up with her in the musical, but not in the play.
DR. PAMELA ISLEY:
In a 1966
Batman
comic, Dr. Isley is a botanist from Seattle who helps a criminal steal an artifact full of ancient herbs. The criminal, fearing she’ll turn on him, poisons her with the herbs. They don’t kill her—they make her superpowered and immune to all natural toxins. She then transforms herself into a supervillain eco-terrorist and Batman’s rival, Poison Ivy (which is a corruption of “Pamela Isley”).
President Grover Cleveland answered the White House phone himself.
DR. RICHARD KIMBLE:
Wrongly accused of killing his wife, Dr. Kimble (David Janssen) searches for the real killer, a one-armed man, over four seasons of
The Fugitive
(1963–67). The theme of a falsely accused man trying to prove his innocence while on the run has been repeated on such TV shows as
The Incredible Hulk, The A-Team,
and even
Run Joe Run,
a
Lassie/Fugitive
hybrid starring a dog falsely accused of attacking its master.
REX MORGAN:
The main character of the dramatic serial comic strip
Rex Morgan, M.D
. that’s been running since 1948, created by real-life psychiatrist Nicholas P. Dallis. Dallis intended the strip as a means of educating the public about medical issues; more than one fan has credited the strip with helping them diagnose their own illness.
DR. BENTON QUEST:
Jonny Quest’s father on the ’60s adventure cartoon
Jonny Quest
. He’s a jet-set government scientist who conducts top-secret experiments and takes his son along on dangerous adventures around the world. The character Jonny Quest was created when the show’s creators couldn’t obtain the TV rights to the radio series
Jack Armstrong: The All-American Boy
.
DR. STRANGELOVE:
One of three characters portrayed by Peter Sellers in the 1964 nuclear war farce
Dr. Strange love or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
. Serving as a scientific advisor to the U.S. President Muffley (also Sellers), Strangelove, a former Nazi, keeps accidentally referring to the president as “mein Führer,” and his hand, as if it had a mind of its own, makes the Nazi salute. (The real-life neurological disorder “alien hand syndrome” is also known as “Dr. Strangelove syndrome.”)
DOCTOR
ZHIWAGO:
A novel by Russian author Boris Pasternak, it follows surgeon and poet Yuri Zhivago as he falls in love with his muse, a girl named Lara, but then marries another woman, all against the backdrop of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. The 1965 film, starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie, was a massive hit: Adjusted for inflation, it’s the eighth-highest-grossing film of all time.
The 2010 Winter Olympics medals were made from recycled TVs and computers.
There’s nothing like a good dose of irony to put the problems of day-to-day life into proper perspective
.
S
CARED STIFF
A 2010 Indiana University study found that anti-drinking commercials that use scare tactics tend to bring out “feelings so unpleasant that alcoholics are compelled to eliminate them by whatever means possible.” According to the study’s respondents, they cope by drinking. Result: “Alcoholics actually drink more than if they hadn’t been exposed to the ads in the first place.”
I’VE FALLEN AND I CAN’T AVOID THE IRONY
Between 1998 and 2009, four senior citizens were killed by the pendant cords attached to the Philips Lifeline medical alert buttons they were wearing around their necks. Cause of death: The victims fell down and the cords became entangled with objects such as doorknobs. (The alert buttons now come with a hazard warning.)
ART IMITATES DEATH
After actress Brittany Murphy, 32, died of a heart attack while taking a shower in December 2009, First Look Pictures immediately recalled and replaced the DVD cover art for her recently released film,
Deadline
. The reason: It depicted Murphy as a lifeless corpse lying in a bathtub.
BOOB TUBE
In 2009 the Walt Disney Company offered refunds to parents who purchased the
Baby Einstein
educational video after a study found that infants who watched the video actually learned fewer words than those who didn’t. Said one researcher: “The more they watched, the less they learned.”
WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE
• An “environmental catastrophe” occurred when hundreds of birds, reptiles, and other woodland creatures were killed and eaten in a German forest in 2009. Who ate them? Minks—more than 4,000 of them—that had been set free from a nearby mink farm by animal activists.
The first MGM lion was named Slats.
• In 2009 PETA released a print ad called “Fur Free and Fabulous,” featuring stock photos of Tyra Banks, Carrie Underwood, Michelle Obama, and Oprah Winfrey. Apparently no one at PETA was paying attention, because the photo of Winfrey shows her wearing a leather skirt.
BOMBS (AWAY)
Remote-controlled drones that bomb foreign targets were designed, in part, to reduce combat stress. But unlike traditional bomber pilots, a remote operator sees the target up close and observes what happens. The operator is farther away physically, but actually
sees
the destruction. The result, according to defense expert P. W. Singer of the Brookings Institution: “There are higher levels of combat stress among remote U.S. units than among units serving in Afghanistan.”
FIRE IN THE SKY
In March 2010, astronomers at Arizona’s Whipple Observatory complained to state authorities that bright, manmade lights were brightening the dark skies—inhibiting the astronomers’ search for interstellar phenomena and, by extension, space aliens. The bright lights, it turned out, were being used by the U.S. Border Patrol in their ongoing search for
illegal
aliens.
FLYRONY
In 2001 Christian Browning, 60, and his wife were terrorized by a pair of gulls nesting near their home in Cornwall, England. “We couldn’t even go into our garden,” he said. Browning is the son of author Daphne du Maurier, who wrote the novella that was later adapted into Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 horror film
The Birds
.
YOU’RE KIDDING, RIGHT?
At the head offices of the National Association of Telemarketers in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a sign is posted on the front door that reads “Absolutely NO SOLICITING.”
Would you? 81% of Americans say they’d tell a friend if his fly was unzipped.
More tantalizing real-life tales from the bank vault, to remind you to be careful what you wish for!
C
ustomer:
Louise Inger, 34, from Derby, England
Bank Error:
In November 2003, Inger was down on her luck: She was off work due to illness and had only £49 (about $80) to her name. And the holidays were right around the corner. Then, on November 28, her bank deposited £24,550—just over $40,000—into her account by mistake. The money belonged to the Derby City Council and was supposed to be paid into the account of Inger’s landlord, Hallmark Community Housing. But a finance officer entered Inger’s information into the computer system instead of Hallmark’s, causing the money to be paid into her account.
What Happened:
As soon as Inger realized the money was in her account, she and her boyfriend, 32-year-old Nathan Sault, started spending it, and kept right on spending it even after the Derby City Council sent a letter, and then a bill collector, to Inger’s house to get the money back. The pair managed to blow all but $650 of the council’s money in just six days, buying furniture, clothing, eyeglasses, mobile phones, fine wines, a $4,400 TV, Christmas presents, and a trip to Disneyland Paris. They were arrested shortly after they returned home and before they could take a trip they’d booked to Egypt. Inger admitted to the theft immediately. “I had hardly been out this year, so I just let go and had a good time. In all honesty, it was a thrill.”
Outcome:
Police confiscated $10,400 worth of swag from Inger’s apartment; she and Sault were both convicted of theft and each served six months in jail for their six-day spending spree. The bank sued Inger to recover the rest of the money…but decided not to sue Sault. Though prosecutors say he was present for every purchase Inger made, he was considered personally responsible for stealing only $1,000, which he used to pay off an overdraft.
World’s largest school: City Montessori School in Lucknow, India, which has a record enrollment of 32,114 pupils.
Customer:
Charrise Lott, 29, an employee of Chase Home Finance in Cleveland, Ohio
Bank Error:
On March 20, 2004, Lott transferred $325 from her Chase savings account into her Chase checking account. But the bank deposited $32,500 into the account, not $325.
What Happened:
Prosecutors say Lott immediately transferred $10,000 into her savings account, went on a $6,000 spending spree, and then wrote $14,000 worth of checks, including $7,500 that she gave to relatives and $5,907 that she spent on a motorcycle.
Outcome:
At last report, Lott was under indictment by a grand jury on fraud charges.
Customer:
An unidentified Brazilian man
Bank Error:
In 1997 the man received a letter from his bank, the state-owned Banco do Brasil, informing him that his bank account had a balance of one billion reals (approximately $560 million).
What Happened:
The man did the honest thing—he notified the bank of the error. But rather than correct the mistake, some of the bank’s employees hatched a plot to withdraw the money, launder it through local currency exchanges, and deposit it in bank accounts abroad. The schemers offered to pay the man a 5% share, or $28 million, in exchange for his cooperation. He agreed.
Outcome:
The conspirators spent a decade trying to figure out how to get the one billion reals out of the man’s account without alerting the bank. By the time the plot was broken up in 2007, the scheme had grown to include more than 150 people, including several government employees in three different Brazilian states. And in all that time, the plotters never did manage to withdraw any money from the man’s account. (It’s not even clear that the money ever really existed; it may have been nothing more than a typographical error on the letter the man received from the bank.)
Customer:
Linda Parish, a 50-year-old grandmother living in Lower Earley, England
Bank Error:
In June 2001, Parish, who works as a chauffeur, sold a home she owned for a £47,000 profit (about $67,000). On the advice of managers at her Lloyd’s TSB branch, she transferred the money into a high-interest savings account. But when Lloyd’s transferred the money into the new account, it neglected to subtract the same amount from the old account, giving Parish two accounts containing £47,000 instead of one.