Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader (40 page)

THE VERDICT:
Incredibly, he won. The jury awarded him $242,000 in damages.

THE PLAINTIFF:
The family of 89-year-old Mimi Goldberg, a Jewish woman who died in 1991

THE DEFENDANT:
The Associated Memorial Group, a Hawaiian firm that ran nine funeral homes

THE LAWSUIT:
In 1993 Goldberg’s body was shipped from the Nuuanu Mortuary in Hawaii to California. When the casket was opened at an Oakland synagogue, “the remains of a dissected fetal pig in a plastic bag” were found resting next to the body. A mortuary representative said the pig had been put there accidentally by an employee “whose wife was taking a class requiring the dissection of fetal pigs.” The woman’s family, horrified because Jewish religious law specifically bans pork, sued.

THE VERDICT:
The family won $750,000. In addition, the funeral home was ordered to make a donation to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial, and print an apology in leading West Coast newspapers.

THE PLAINTIFF:
Dimitri K. Sleem, a 38-year-old Yale graduate

THE DEFENDANT:
Yale University

THE LAWSUIT:
In April 1993, an old college friend called Sleem to read him the entry listed under his name in the 1993 Yale alumni directory. It said: “I have come to terms with my homosexuality and the reality of AIDS in my life. I am at peace.” Sleem—who didn’t have AIDS, wasn’t gay, and was married with four children—filed a $5 million libel suit against Yale.

THE VERDICT:
Still pending. Meanwhile, Yale hired a handwriting expert to find out who submitted the false statement.

In New Orleans, the soil is too wet for regular burials—so the dead are buried above ground.

TV comments about everyday Ufe. From PrimeTime Proverbs, by Jack Mingo and John Javna
.

ON GROWING UP

Robin
[gazing at a female criminal’s legs]: “Her legs sort of remind me of Catwoman’s.”

Batman:
“You’re growing up Robin, but remember: In crimefighting, always keep your sights high.”

—“Batman”

ON LIFE

[As she folds her son’s clothes] “There’s got to be more to life that sittin’ here watchin’ ‘Days of Our Lives’ and foldin’ your Fruit of the Looms.”

—Mama,
“
Mama’s Family
”

Coach Ernie Pantusso:

“How’s life, Norm?”

Norm Peterson:
“Ask somebody who’s got one.”

—“Cheers
”

ON PSYCHIATRY

TV interviewer:
“You mean, you ask forty dollars an hour and you guarantee nothing?”

Bob Hartley: “Well, I validate.”

—“
The Bob Newhart Show
”

ON MENTAL HEALTH

Bob Hartley:
“Howard, what do you do when you’re upset?”

Howard Borden:
“Well, I’ve got a method—it always works. I go into a dark room, open up all the windows, take off all my clothes, and eat something cold. No, wait a minute, I do that when I’m overheated. When I have a problem I just go to pieces.”

—“
The Bob Newhart Show
”

[To an old flame] “Someday your Mr. Right will come along. And when he does, he’s gonna be wearing a white coat and a butterfly net.”

—Louie DePalma,
“
Taxi
”

ON MASCULINITY

Ward Cleaver:
“You know, Wally, shaving is just one of the outward signs of being a man. It’s more important to try to be a man inside first.”

Wally Cleaver:
“Yeah sure, Dad.”

—“
Leave It to Beaver
”

Look out below: An average of 14 people jump off the Golden Gate Bridge every year.

After Tutankhamen’s tomb was unearthed in 1922, a number of people associated with the discovery died mysterious deaths. Was it coincidence...or was it a curse?

B
ACKGROUND
King Tutankhamen reigned from about 1334 to 1325 B.C., at the height of ancient Egypt’s glory. The “boy king” was only about 9 when he was crowned, and died mysteriously at the age of 18 or 19. He was buried beside other pharaohs in the Valley of the Kings, near the Nile River at Luxor, the capital of ancient Egypt.

THE DISCOVERY

King Tutankhamen’s tomb remained undisturbed for more than 3,000 years until it was unearthed in November 1922 by Howard Carter, an amateur archeologist commissioned by the English nobleman Lord Carnarvon to find it. Carter’s discovery was due largely to luck; having exhausted a number of other leads, he finally decided to dig in a rocky patch of ground between the tombs of three other pharaohs. Three feet under the soil he found the first of a series of 16 steps, which led down to a sealed stone door. Markings on the door confirmed that it was a royal tomb. Realizing what he had discovered, Carter ordered the steps buried again, and wired Lord Carnarvon in London to join him.

Three weeks later, Carnarvon arrived and digging resumed. The first stone door was opened, revealing a 30-foot-long passageway leading to a second stone door. Carter opened the second door and, peeking into the darkness with the light of a single candle, was greeted by an amazing sight—two entire rooms stuffed with priceless gold artifacts that had not seen the light of day for more than 30 centuries. The room was so crammed with statues, chariots, furniture, and other objects that it took two full months to catalog and remove items in the first room alone. Tutankhamen’s body lay in a solid gold coffin in the next room; the gold coffin was itself encased inside three other coffins, which rested inside a huge golden shrine that took up nearly the entire room.

Beer wasn’t sold in cans until 1935.

The discovery of the site was hailed as “the greatest find in the annals of archeology.” Unlike other tombs, Tutankhamen’s was almost completely undisturbed by graverobbers; its hundreds of artifacts provided a glimpse of ancient Egyptian cultural life that had never been seen before.

THE CURSE

But unearthing the treasures may have been a dangerous move—soon after the Tut discovery was announced, rumors about a curse on his tomb’s defilers began to circulate. They weren’t taken seriously—until Lord Carnarvon came down with a mysterious fever and died.

The curse gained credibility when word came from Lord Carnarvon’s home in England at 1:50 a.m.—the exact moment of Lord Carnarvon’s death—that his favorite dog had suddenly collapsed and died. And at
precisely
the same moment, Cairo was plunged into darkness, due to an unexplainable power failure.

Other Deaths:
Over the next several years, a series of people associated with the Tut excavation died unexpectedly, often under mysterious circumstances. The dead in 1923 alone included Lord Carnarvon’s brother, Col. Aubrey Herbert; Cairo archaeologist Achmed Kamal, and American Egyptologist William Henry Goodyear.

• The following year, British radiologist Archibald Reed died on his way to Luxor, where he planned to X-ray Tut’s still-unopened coffin. Oxford archeologist Hugh Eveyln-White, who had dug in the necropolis at Thebes, also died in 1924.

• Edouard Neville, Carter’s teacher, as well as George Jay-Gould, Carnarvon’s friend, papyrus expert Bernard Greenfell, American Egyptologist Aaron Ember, and the nurse who attended to Lord Carnarvon all died in 1926. Ember’s death was particularly spooky—he was attempting to rescue from his burning house a manuscript he had worked on for years:
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
.

• In 1929 Lord Carnarvon’s wife, Lady Almina, died, as did John Maxwell, the Earl’s friend and executor, and Carter’s secretary, Richard Bethell, who was found dead in bed, apparently from circulatory failure, at the age of 35.

If you keep your goldfish in a dark room, they’ll turn white.

THE AFTERMATH

Fallout from the rumors of the curse continued for years, as did the string of mysterious deaths.

• As accounts of the deaths circulated, hysteria spread. In England, hundreds of people shipped everything they had that was even remotely Egyptian to the British Museum—including an arm from a mummy.

• The popularity of the curse legend led to a series of classic horror films: “The Mummy” (1932), starring Boris Karloff, and “The Mummy’s Hand” (1940) and three sequels starring Lon Chaney, Jr.—“The Mummy’s Tomb” (1942), “The Mummy’s Ghost” and “The Mummy’s Curse” (both 1944).

LAST WORDS

• Was the curse for real? Many prominent people insisted that it wasn’t; they argued that the mortality rates of people associated with the Tutankhamen discovery and other finds were no higher than that of the general public. Dr. Gamal Mehrez, Director-General of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, disputed the curse in an interview made several years after the discovery of Tut’s tomb. “All my life,” he said, “I have had to deal with pharaonic tombs and mummies. I am surely the best proof that it is all coincidence.” Four weeks later he dropped dead of circulatory failure, as workers were moving Tutankhamen’s gold mask for transport to London.

• For what it’s worth, Lord Carnarvon’s son, the sixth Earl of Carnarvon, accepts the curse at face value. Shortly after the fifth earl’s burial, a woman claiming psychic powers appeared at Highclere Castle and warned the sixth earl, “Don’t go near your father’s grave! It will bring you bad luck!” The wary earl heeded her advice and never visited the grave. In 1977 he told an NBC interviewer that he “neither believed nor disbelieved” the curse—but added that he would “not accept a million pounds to enter the tomb of Tutankhamen.”

Profound thought:
“It’s a question of whether we’re going to go forward with the future, or past to the back.”—
Dan Quayle

King Louis XIX ruled France for about 15 minutes.

Background info on some of the foods you love—and some you love to hate
.

C
HEEZ WHIZ.
Invented by Kraft laboratory technicians in 1951. According to
The Encyclopedia of Pop Culture
, they were looking for a cheese product that wouldn’t clump or “disintegrate into ugly, oily wads of dairy fat glop,” like real cheese did when heated. It was first test-marketed to housewives in 1952; they found 1,304 different uses for it.

TANG.
Fresh from the success of its decade-long struggle to get consumers to give instant coffee a try, in 1955 General Foods decided to try the same tactic with orange juice. Its goal: To make a “fruit-flavored breakfast companion to Instant Maxwell House coffee.” It took 10 years to perfect the recipe, but one advantage of the delay was that three months after it made its nationwide debut in 1965, NASA announced that Tang would be used to feed the
Gemini
astronauts in space. General Foods played the endorsement for all it was worth. The orangy powder never bit into orange juice sales, but it was still a hit—at least until Americans lost their taste for both the space program and artificial foods in the 1980s.

PRETZELS.
According to legend, pretzels were invented by an Italian monk during the Middle Ages because he wanted something he could give to children who memorized their prayers. He rolled dough into a long rope and shaped it so it looked like arms folded in prayer. He called his salty treats
pretioles
, Latin for “little gift.”

MACARONI & CHEESE.
During the Depression, the Kraft company tried to market a low-priced cheddar cheese powder to the American public—but the public wouldn’t buy it. One St. Louis salesman, looking for a way to unload his allotment of the stuff, tied individual packages to macaroni boxes and talked grocers on his route into selling them as one item, which he called “Kraft Dinners.” When the company found out how well they were selling, it made the Dinners an official part of its product line.

Bathroom news: Franklin Roosevelt thought up the name “United Nations” in the shower.

Here’s a multiple-choice quiz to find out how much you really know about filmdom’s most famous dinosaur. Answers are on
page 662
.

1.
Godzilla first lumbered out of the ocean in a 1954 film titled
Gojira
. The dino-monster was awakened from a million-year slumber by A-bomb testing underseas and went on a rampage, destroying Tokyo, wreaking havoc with his radioactive breath. In 1956, the movie was brought to the U.S. as
Godzilla, King of Monsters
(“Makes King Kong Look Like a Midget!”). How did they adapt it for American audiences?

A)
They made it seem as though Godzilla was fighting for the U.S. during World War II.

B)
They inserted footage of Godzilla destroying New York City and Washington, D.C. as well.

C)
They added Raymond Burr, casting him as a hospitalized reporter who remembers the whole incident as a flashback.

2.
The first Japanese sequel to
Gojira
was made in 1955. But when this flick finally made it to the U.S. in 1959, it didn’t mention Godzilla in the title. What was it called, and why?