Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (46 page)

• In the 1980s, the Iraqi government developed an extensive biological-weapons program and produced large amounts of anthrax bacteria. For this reason, American and allied soldiers were inoculated with anthrax vaccine before the Persian Gulf War in 1991. No biological weapons are believed to have been used in the war.

So how were the deadly bacteria used to terrorize a nation in 2001? Turn to
page 424
to find out
.

KURT’S CUTS

Kurt Vonnegut is one of our favorite authors here at the BRI. He wrote science fiction, but he was all about humor and what it means to be human
.

“All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.”

“If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don’t need an enemy.”

“Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?”

“I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’”

“Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow, whether there is a market for it or not.”

“It is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn’t meant to be reasonable.”

“Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.”

“There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution: Only nut cases want to be president.”

“Earth, should it find a voice and a sense of irony, might now well say of our abuse of it, ‘Forgive them, Father, They know not what they do.’ The irony would be that we know what we are doing.”

“Everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”

“I fully expected that by the time I was 21, some scientist would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty and sold it to
Popular Mechanics
magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.”

“The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers.”

“Enjoy the little things in life, for one day you’ll look back and realize they were big things.”

Sauerkraut was invented by the Chinese.

WEIRD CANADA

Canada: land of beautiful mountains, clear lakes…and some really odd news stories
.

Y
OU WANT THE TOOTH, OFFICER?
Outside Sarnia, Ontario, in June 2010, a driver flagged down a police officer on Highway 402 to warn him of a semi truck meandering all over the road. The officer caught up to the truck and pulled it over. The driver’s explanation for his erratic driving: He was attempting to pull out one of his teeth. No longer able to deal with a toothache, he tied one end of a piece of string to the bad tooth and the other to the roof of his cab. “One good bump” and it would come right out, he told the officer. As it turned out, he was right—the officer could tell by the bloody tooth on a string sitting on the seat.

BEEFY VINO

In Japan, Wagyu cattle are fed beer and massaged with sake each day. The result is the richly flavored and expensive (more than $100 a pound) Kobe beef. Seeking to create his own specialty beef market, Bill Freding of Southern Plus Feedlots in Oliver, B.C., has developed his own booze-based method: wine-fed cows. Like the cattle at other high-volume beef producers, Freding’s cattle eat a diet of primarily grain. But they also drink a liter of wine every day for 90 days prior to slaughter. The red wine is from wineries in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia, and Freding claims the beef tastes “sweeter.”

ANIMAL ACT

Wildlife officials in Deer Lake, Newfoundland, had to put down a moose in 2009, after someone reported the animal collapsing from exhaustion in their backyard. Witnesses reported seeing three teenage boys chasing the moose for hours and hitting it with sticks. The teens were quickly caught, brought up on animal cruelty charges…and acquitted. Why? One of the boys’ fathers testified that they couldn’t have been abusing the moose, because at the time they were busy vandalizing a local church.

What’s Mt. Lee’s claim to fame? It’s the hill that the famous “HOLLYWOOD” sign stands on.

PLEASE KNOCK FIRST

For Valentine’s Day 2010, the Toronto restaurant Mildred’s Temple Kitchen pulled out all the stops for romantic diners—serving intimate meals for two…and openly encouraging couples to “couple” in the restrooms. A handful of concerned citizens reported the Mildred’s promotion to the Toronto Public Health office. The agency investigated and found nothing wrong with the idea, as long as frisky patrons stayed out of food-preparation areas.

THE LAW IS THE LAW

In June 2010, Marika De Florio’s five-year-old neighbor was driving her crazy, riding his battery-powered four-wheeler past her Seeley Bay, Ontario, house over and over again all afternoon. She asked the boy’s grandparents several times to keep it down, but to no avail. So De Florio went outside and, in full view of the boy, took off her shirt. That, she reasoned, would convince the boy’s grandparents to bring him inside. Indeed, Mike and Nancy Berry quickly hustled their grandson inside and then called the police on De Florio. No charges were pressed, however—it’s legal in Seeley Bay for women to be topless in public.

DIRTY YOUNG MEN

Professor Simon Louis Lajeunesse of the University of Montreal’s social work department began a project in December 2009 investigating how pornography affects the way men view and relate to women. Part of that research required a “control group” for comparison, so Lajeunesse advertised around Montreal to recruit 20 young men who did not view pornography. He received zero responses.

BAN-ADA

In the 1910s, Toronto police had full authority over movies, including the right to ban films they considered offensive. The criteria: Any movie that showed a pro-America attitude, murder, or an extramarital romance could be banned.
Any
movie. In 1911, an inspector reported, “I witnessed a moving picture show of
Hamlet,
written I think by Shakespeare. That’s all very well to say it’s a famous drama, but it doesn’t keep it from being a spectacle of violence.” A few weeks later, the same inspector banned a film version of
Romeo and Juliet
.

Bees fly at about 12 mph.

FAMILY BUSINESS

It’s hard to become famous. One thing that often helps: having a famous parent. Some of these may surprise you
.

R
ASHIDA JONES.
She co-stars on the sitcom
Parks and Recreation
and has a role on
The Office
. Her mother is
The Mod Squad
star
Peggy Lipton;
her father is music producer
Quincy Jones.

MITT ROMNEY.
The former Massachusetts governor and 2008 presidential candidate is the son of Michigan governor and 1968 presidential candidate
George Romney.

JOSS WHEDON.
He has created four TV series with low ratings and rabid cult fan bases
—Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly,
and
Dollhouse
—but got his start as a staff writer on
Roseanne
. He’s also the first third-generation television writer: His father,
Tom Whedon,
wrote for
The Golden Girls,
and his grandfather,
John Whedon,
wrote for
The Donna Reed Show
.

NORAH JONES.
She’s the daughter of classical sitarist
Ravi Shankar.
(He didn’t raise her, though, and they’ve had long periods of estrangement.)

PAUL GIAMATTI.
The Oscar-nominated actor (
Sideways, American Splendor
) is the son of
A. Bartlett Giamatti,
a president of Yale University before becoming president of baseball’s National League in 1986, and then commissioner of Major League Baseball in 1989. He was in the position for only a few months before he died, but it was long enough to ban gambler Pete Rose from baseball for life.

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA.
He directed
Apocalypse Now
and
The Godfather
. His father,
Carmine Coppola,
a film-score composer long before his son became one of the most important directors of his generation, composed the music for many of his son’s films. Francis’s daughter,
Sofia Coppola,
also became a director, winning an Oscar for her second film,
Lost in Translation
.

WHITNEY HOUSTON.
Her, mother
Cissy Houston,
is primarily a gospel singer but once paid the bills as a backup singer for

Only developed nation where medical bankruptcies occur: the United States.

Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin. (And Dionne Warwick is Whitney’s aunt.)

ELVIS COSTELLO.
He’s one of the most influential rock musicians of the last 30 years, but
his
biggest influence was his father, bandleader and trumpet player
Ross MacManus.

ZAK STARKEY.
He’s the current drummer for the Who. It’s not easy to fill in for Keith Moon, the band’s legendary drummer, who died in 1978. But Starkey has a decent resume: He was once the drummer for the band Oasis…and his father is
Ringo Starr.

DUNCAN JONES.
He’s the winner of the 2010 BAFTA Award (the British Oscar) for best first-time British director for his film
Moon
. He’s also the son of rock legend
David Bowie,
and was better known as Zowie Bowie during his childhood.

GEORGE W. BUSH.
President Bush is the son of another president Bush,
George H.W. Bush,
who is the son of banker, Wall Street executive, and U.S. Senator
Prescott Bush.
And Prescott Bush was the son of
Samuel Bush,
one of the most prominent and powerful business tycoons of the early 20th century.

GRANT HILL.
Hill was one of the biggest stars of the NBA in the 1990s, being named the Rookie of the Year and playing in five all-star games. His father,
Calvin Hill,
was also a star athlete, but in professional football, not basketball. He played from 1969 to 1981, winning a Super Bowl with the Dallas Cowboys in 1972.

KRISTIN GORE.
Like many comedy writers, she went to Harvard, was the editor of the humor magazine the
Harvard Lampoon,
and parlayed that into writing jobs for TV shows such as
Futurama
and
Saturday Night Live
. A guest star on both those shows during Gore’s stints: her father, former vice president
Al Gore.

LISA MURKOWSKI.
She has served as a U.S. senator from Alaska since 2002. Her predecessor: her father,
Frank Murkowski,
who left Congress after 21 years to become the governor of the state and appointed his daughter to finish out his Senate term. She was reelected to a full term in 2004.

STELLA MCCARTNEY.
She’s one of the world’s most famous and top-earning fashion designers. Her father is
Paul McCartney,
of the ’70s rock band Wings (and the Beatles).

According to
Match.com
, 1 in 5 modern relationships start on an online dating site.

KNOCK-KNOCK JOKES

We used to think limericks were the lowest form of humor. (We were wrong.)

A:
Desdemona.

Q:
Desdemona who?

A:
Desdemona Lisa still hang in Paris?

A:
Wayne.

Q:
Wayne who?

A:
Wayne dwops keep falling on my head.

A:
Amaryllis.

Q:
Amaryllis who?

A:
Amaryllis state agent. Wanna buy a house?

A:
Shelby.

Q:
Shelby who?

A:
Shelby comin’ ’round the mountain when she comes…

A:
Esther.

Q:
Esther who?

A:
The Esther Bunny!

A:
Venue.

Q:
Venue who?

A:
Venue vish upon a star…

A:
Tarzan.

Q:
Tarzan who?

A:
Tarzan stripes forever!

A:
Yule.

Q:
Yule who?

A:
Yule never know until you open the door.

A:
Zeus.

Q:
Zeus who?

A:
Zeus company, three’s a crowd.

A:
Interrupting cow

Q:
Interrupting c

A:
MOO.

A:
Dwayne.

Q:
Dwayne who?

A:
Dwayne the tub, I’m dwowning!

A:
Macho.

Q:
Macho who?

A:
Macho do about

nothing.

A:
Marcus Welby.

Q:
Marcus Welby who?

A:
I Marcus Welby dead for all you care.