Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (62 page)

Burning wood in a fireplace can actually make it colder in the house.

THE SINGER

Choosing style over comfort for an eight-hour flight from London to New York in February 2010, eccentric pop singer Lady Gaga wore a black-and-yellow striped dress made out of tightly wound police tape and matching 10-inch-high-heeled shoes. As the hours wore on, Gaga grew uncomfortable. A flight attendant advised her to remove the shoes, but Gaga refused. “I would rather die than have my fans not see me in a pair of high heels,” she said. But when her legs started swelling up (a potentially fatal condition known as
deep vein thrombosis),
it took two flight attendants to remove the shoes and cut her out of the dress. Gaga changed into a black dress, furry boots, and a veil, which airport security asked her to remove (the veil, not the dress and boots) when she arrived in New York. She refused. After questioning, the cops let Gaga go.

THE SUPERMODEL VS. THE PILOT

While the plane was still on the tarmac at London’s Heathrow Airport in 2008, British Airways captain Miles Sutherland took the unusual step of personally informing a passenger that one of her three bags had gone missing. That passenger was tantrumprone supermodel Naomi Campbell. She cut Sutherland off mid-sentence and called someone on her mobile phone, saying, “They have lost my f***ing bag! Get me another flight! Get the press! Get my lawyer!” Sutherland tried to inform her of her options, but was again cut off: “How dare you tell me what my options are,” she said. “You are not leaving until you find my f***ing bag!” (It contained her favorite pair of jeans.) Sutherland walked away while Campbell shouted, “You are a racist! You wouldn’t be doing this if I was white!” When police came to get her, she spat at and kicked them. According to a witness, “Campbell was wearing formidable platform boots with stiletto-style heels.” She was
convicted of assaulting an officer and disorderly conduct, fined £2,300 ($3,500) and ordered to perform 200 hours of community service.

The Fatburger fast-food chain sells “Hypocrites”—veggie burgers topped with bacon.

THE RAPPER VS. THE POLITICIAN

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and Grammy-nominated rapper Sky Blu (real name: Skyler Gordy, nephew of Motown founder Berry Gordy) were on the same Air Canada flight, returning to Los Angeles after attending the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia. While they were still at the airport, Sky Blu reclined his seat back. Romney was sitting behind him. The plane had pulled away from the gate and was rolling toward the runway, which meant the seats were supposed to be in the upright position. According to Sky Blu, Romney sternly ordered him to put up his seat-back. Sky Blu ignored him. Romney asked again, and then grabbed his shoulder in a “Vulcan grip.” Sky Blu stood up, turned around, and raised his fists. “I didn’t take it any further than that,” he later told reporters. “The man assaulted me. I was protecting myself.” But according to a spokesperson for Romney, the rapper actually took a swing at the politician. Whether he did or not, Romney’s wife screamed, the flight crew intervened, and the plane returned to the gate, where police took Sky Blu into custody. Romney didn’t press charges; Sky Blu was released and caught a later flight home. He later said that if Romney had simply asked him nicely, he would have put his seat-back up.

PARENTAL ADVISORY: DICK VAN DYKE

In October 2008, a technical glitch in Apple’s iTunes Music Store led to unintentional censorship of song titles without regard to context. For example, Dick Van Dyke’s novelty song “The Dick Van Dyke Song” was listed as “The D**k Van D**e Song,” and Danny Kaye’s “I Thought I Saw a Pussy Cat” became “I Thought I Saw a P***y Cat.” The errors occurred when Apple ran an internal check for explicit song titles…and the software automatically censored the titles.

Sacramento Kings forward Lionel Simmons missed two games in 1991. Reason: tendinitis from playing too much Game Boy.

BAD NEWS / GOOD NEWS

More proof that not every cloud has a silver lining…but some do
.

C
ALL ME
Bad News:
One night in March 2010, Dan Oien, 62, began suffering seizures in his Indianapolis, Indiana, home. Oien, who had been fighting brain cancer for some time, tried to call for help. Unfortunately, he didn’t have enough control of his muscles to dial the right number, and he accidentally called a local college student named Aquarius Arnolds. Arnolds didn’t recognize the number on her caller ID—and she doesn’t answer such calls.

Good News:
Normally
she doesn’t answer such calls, but this time, for some reason, she did. “I couldn’t understand anything the caller was saying,” Arnolds said. “It seemed like he was in distress, so I just said, ‘Do you need help?’ and he belted out ‘Yes.’” Arnolds quickly called 911 and gave them the caller’s phone number. Minutes later paramedics busted down Oien’s door and rushed him to a hospital. “He dialed one phone number, and it just happened to be the right person,” said Sherry Proctor, Oien’s girlfriend. “I thank God for that.” She added that Arnolds’s actions allowed the terminally ill man’s out-of-town siblings to visit him before he passed away. (And Arnolds herself became a regular visitor to Oien’s bedside in the months before he died.)

EASY STREET

Bad News:
In the early 2000s, Tommy Larkin of Newfoundland, Canada, began looking for his younger brother; they had been adopted into different families when they were kids in the early 1980s. Unfortunately, despite years of trying, he’d had no luck and was close to resigning himself to the fact that he was never going to find his brother.

Good News:
In 2010 Larkin, now 30 years old, got a call from the adoption agency that had been helping him. They’d found his brother. The woman at the agency, Larkin said later, gave him his brother’s name—Stephen Goosney—“and asked four or five times
if I knew him. I said I didn’t, and she kept asking me if I was sure I haven’t met him.” Why was she being so insistent? Because Goosney lived across the street from him. It turned out that the long-lost brothers had lived on the same street for more than two years and had lived across the street from each other for the previous seven months. Not only that, Stephen Goosney had been looking for
his
lost brother all that time, too. “It was a good feeling,” Goosney told reporters, “knowing there was actually someone looking for me,” adding that he and his newfound brother were now “just hanging out and trying to catch up.”

SHOP AROUND

Bad News:
For several years, social worker Dan Coyne did all his grocery shopping at the same Jewel-Osco store in Evanston, Illinois. And his favorite checkout clerk was Myra de la Vega. “Whenever I saw her working there I’d intentionally go to her line,” Coyne, 52, told CNN, “because she’s one of those rare employees that treats everybody with respect and kindness.” One day de la Vega, 57, didn’t look so good. Coyne asked her what was wrong, and she told him that she’d been diagnosed with renal failure, which required her to undergo nearly eight hours of dialysis every night. She needed a kidney transplant but couldn’t find a donor. Not even her own sister was the right blood match.

Good News:
Coyne went home and talked to his wife about it and, a few days later, offered de la Vega one of his kidneys. She was understandably shocked—she only knew Coyne from the store. But Coyne was serious. He got tested and—against 4,000-to-1 odds—was a perfect match. Finally, two years after Coyne made his offer, on March 26, 2010, he and de la Vega walked together into Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s Kovlar Organ Transplantation Center in Chicago. Several hours later, Coyne’s favorite checkout clerk had one of his kidneys. “It was an easy decision,” Coyne said. “All I have to do is fall asleep on a table, and then the doctors take over.” De la Vega was, of course, a bit more impressed. “I think he is an angel living on Earth,” she said. “You can say I’m corny but that’s how I regard him.” Both patients made full recoveries—and de la Vega is no longer on dialysis.

7% of American men say they’ve sold their ex’s stuff on eBay.

HOW TO HYPNOTIZE
A CHICKEN

When Uncle John learned that it was possible to do this, his first thought was, “Why would anyone want to hypnotize a chicken?” Good question. As Sir Edmund Hillary would say, “because it’s there.” (And it’s a lot easier than climbing Mt. Everest.)

Y
OUR CHICKEN IS GETTING SLEEPY…
It wasn’t very long ago that most Americans lived on farms, and lots of people knew how to hypnotize chickens. Not anymore—how many people can say they know
anything
about chickens, let alone how to hypnotize one? But if you ever get a chance to place a chicken under your spell, give it a try—it’s fascinating to watch, harmless and painless for the chicken, and it provides an interesting insight into animal intelligence and behavior. (Who knows—you might even win a bar bet.)

STEP BY STEP

1. Techniques vary widely from place to place. Some methods call for laying the chicken gently on its side, with one wing under its body, holding it in place with one hand so that your other hand is free. Others say that turning the chicken upside down, lying on its back with its feet up in the air, is best. Either way, the disoriented bird will need a second to regain its bearings, but once it does it will not be bothered by being in this unfamiliar position.

2. Some hypnotists advocate placing a finger on the ground at the tip of the chicken’s beak and drawing a line four inches long in the dirt extending out from the beak and parallel to it (picture Pinocchio’s nose growing). Trace your finger back and forth along the line for several seconds. Other practitioners say that drawing a circle, not lines, in the dirt around the chicken’s head works best. Still others say all you need to do is stroke the chicken on its head and neck with your index finger. If one method doesn’t seem to work, try another.

3. Whichever method you try, keep at it for several seconds.
That’s about how long it takes for a chicken to go into a trance. Its breathing and heart rate will slow considerably, and its body temperature may even drop a few degrees.

35% of airplane accidents occur during takeoff; 60% occur during landings.

4. You can now let go of the chicken. It will lie perfectly still in a trancelike state for several seconds, several minutes, or even an hour or more before it comes out of the trance on its own. You can also awaken the chicken yourself by clapping your hands or nudging it gently. (The unofficial world record for a chicken trance: 3 hours, 47 minutes.)

5. If holding a chicken in one hand while hypnotizing it with the other proves too difficult, another technique calls for putting the chicken in the same position it goes into when it’s asleep—with its head under one wing—and rocking it gently to induce a trance.

CHICKEN SCIENCE

Just as there are different theories as to which method of chicken hypnotism is best, so too are opinions divided as to what exactly is going on with the chicken when it is being hypnotized:

• The trance could be a panic “freeze” response, similar to a deer stopping in the middle of the road when it sees headlights.

• It may also be an example of
tonic immobility,
a reflex similar to an opossum’s ability to go into a trancelike state when it feels threatened. Chickens roost in the branches of trees or other high places at night; the trance reflex, if that is indeed what it is, may help the chicken to remain perfectly still, silent, and (hopefully) unnoticed as foxes, raccoons, and other predators prowl below.

SPORTS MEDICINE