Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader (45 page)

Another of the three remaining species, the giant redwood, is found along the western side of the Sierra Nevada mountains. The most famous of these giants is General Sherman, a mammoth tree 2,700 years old, 103 feet in circumference, and 274 feet tall. It weighs an estimated 4 million pounds and comprises more than 50,000 cubic feet of wood, making it the largest tree on the planet.

EL ARBOR DEL TULE

Just outside the city of Oaxaca, Mexico, is an ancient piece of Meso-American history known as El Tule. This Mexican cypress is believed to be between 2,000 and 4,000 years old. Long before the Spanish arrived in the 1500s, the Aztecs called the area surrounding the tree—now the village of Santa María del Tule—
Tollin
or
Tullin
, meaning “aquatic plants.” The cypress trees themselves were called
ahuehuete
, meaning “ancients of the water” (it is believed they once grew in the swamps of Mexico, which time has transformed into deserts).

Early Spanish settlers documented the native Zapotec people as saying that, before it was struck by lightning in the 1400s, El Tule was so large that it could provide shade for 1,000 people. The bolt of lightning damaged the tree’s branches and left a hollow so large that there was “room inside for 12 horsemen.” Fortunately El Tule has since recovered and now has the second- or third-largest trunk in the world, with a circumference of an amazing 176 feet.

World’s smallest tree: the dwarf willow of Greenland. It grows to about two inches in height.

Some of the BRI staff bet Uncle John that he couldn’t put together this collection of real news stories without mentioning “s–e–x.” Uh-oh, he just lost!

C
AREER COUNSELING.
A German woman filed a complaint after a federal employment office sent her for a job interview—with an “adult” telephone service. They told her she’d be applying for “telemarketing consumer interface relations.” But she got a surprise when the interviewer told her about the job: “He told me I had to answer the phone and moan a lot.” A spokesman for the agency said it was an honest mistake.

HOLY...!
A vicar in Lampoldshausen, Germany, distributed hundreds of videos about the life of Jesus to members of his congregation, only to find out there had been a mix-up at the factory: they were X-rated movies. The vicar, Father Frithjof, saw the bright side of the error: “God moves in mysterious ways,” he said. “The people who ordered these movies now have our religious films about Jesus in their video recorders.”

HOT-HOT-HOT? NOT-NOT-NOT!
A 28-year-old Bulgarian woman sued her local heating company for refusing to turn her heat on—claiming that it was too cold for her and her husband to be intimate. The couple had paid all their bills, but the company had cut off heat to the entire building because so many of their neighbors hadn’t paid theirs. The woman said that she and her husband were trying to have a second child, but the cold had frozen their attempts.

TALL TALE.
The singer Sting admitted that he “stretched” the truth when he once bragged that he and his wife Trudi Styler could make love for eight hours at a time. “What I didn’t say,” he told Britain’s
ITV
, “was that this included four hours of begging and then dinner and a movie.”

When having a conversation, women make eye contact 15% more frequently than men.

FOUR-ALARM PHONE CALLS.
Firefighters at the Jawahar Fire Control in India complained to the local
Mid-day
newspaper that the fire station was getting too hot: they were getting up to 70 amorous calls a day “from bored housewives or barmaids.” The women were saying things like, “What kind of fires do you extinguish? How about dousing the fire in my heart?”

THIRSTY.
In 2001 the water supply system in the Turkish village of Sirt broke down, forcing local woman to walk miles—and stand in line for hours—to get their water. When their pleas to fix the system went unheard, they decided to get serious: they told their husbands, “Get us a proper water supply or no more sex.” And they meant it. A month later, after some serious pleading from the local men, government officials agreed to give the village five kilometers of piping. But the men had to lay all the pipe themselves—and the ban was still on. “They won’t be able to get into our bedrooms until the water actually runs through the taps,” a local woman told reporters. “The protest will continue.”

FASHION POLICE.
In Thailand more than 400 complaints a month came in from policemen. Why? Their new uniforms were too tight, which they claimed made them look “too sexy.” The officers were getting lewd comments from people in the street.

HEY, IT WAS WORTH A TRY.
A German man demanded a government grant to cover the cost of frequenting brothels and renting adult movies. The 35-year-old said that his wife had flown to Thailand and he was lonely. He wanted more than $2,000 a month, stating that, “I require the brothel visits for my physical and psychological well-being.” A German court turned down the request.

NEWS OF THE OBVIOUS.
In 2003 the European Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Society in Rome did a study with some not-so-surprising results. They tested the attention levels of 1,500 men as they watched a female newscaster that they found “attractive” deliver the news. Result: More than 1,100 of them couldn’t remember a single thing said in the first 30 seconds of the newscast.

Longest flight on record for a flying squirrel: 2.5 miles.

More stories to make you scratch your head
.

S
UBJECT:
Fluid Mechanics

WINNER:
Christopher Ogbe, head of the Business Studies Department at Bexley Heath School in Kent, England

CREATIVE APPROACH:
Mr. Ogbe’s trouble started in an airport bar in 2001, while he was getting ready to accompany 29 of his students on a flight to America. He had a few drinks too many, and then on the plane had a few more. Many pints of beer, glasses of wine, and nearly a quart of whiskey later, Ogbe was running wild all over the airplane, throwing food, pinching people on the butt, and flashing the flight attendants. He repeatedly groped a female colleague and referred to one Asian passenger as “Gandhi.” Why’d he do it? Ogbe said he’s claustrophobic and afraid of flying, and thought a drink or two might help calm his nerves.

REACTION:
Ogbe’s claustrophobia might be a bigger problem in his next assignment. He was convicted of assaulting his colleague and sentenced to one year...in a tiny jail cell.

SUBJECT:
Police Procedures

WINNER:
Pat Conroy, dean of students and assistant principal at South Haven High School in Michigan

CREATIVE APPROACH:
In 2003 police brought in a drug-sniffing dog to search for drugs. None were found—not even in the locker of a student that Mr. Conroy strongly suspected of being a drug dealer. That came as a surprise, because as Conroy later admitted to the police, he had
planted
drugs in the locker himself, in the hope that they would be discovered during the search so that he could expel the student.

REACTION:
Police raided Conroy’s office and found drug paraphernalia and 10 bags of marijuana. He told officers he’d been collecting drugs seized from students to use as evidence during expulsion hearings. (According to the school board president, Conroy never brought drugs to any of the hearings the president had attended.) Charged with possession of marijuana, Conroy resigned. The student he suspected of drug dealing was not charged.

The average traffic light is green 22% of the time, yellow 12%, and red 66% of the time.

SUBJECT:
Good Sportsmanship

WINNER:
James Guillen, 24, a special ed teacher who also coaches basketball at Pleasantville Middle School in New Jersey

CREATIVE APPROACH:
Coach Guillen invited a 13-year-old boy on the team to attend the team’s annual banquet because he was getting a special award. The boy watched as other team members received certificates and trophies. Then the coach called him up...and presented him with a Crybaby Award—a trophy of a silver baby on a pedestal—because, the coach explained, the boy always “begged to get in the game, and all he did was whine.”

REACTION:
The boy—an honor student—was so humiliated that he stayed home the following Monday. Coach Guillen claimed he meant it as “a positive thing,” but the board of education wasn’t buying it—they banned him from ever coaching in the district again. Guillen also forfeited a $3,000 pay raise, was suspended for five days, and had to attend sensitivity training.

SUBJECT:
Physics

WINNER:
Randy Wilson, a high school science teacher in Colorado

CREATIVE APPROACH:
Mr. Wilson let a 17-year-old junior build a bomb for the science fair. It wasn’t a real bomb, just a test tube filled with a few ingredients that go into a live bomb, along with a list of other “key components” needed to finish the job.

REACTION:
Wilson was suspended. Was the student punished? No—after all, he had his teacher’s permission to build the bomb.

HONORABLE MENTION

SUBJECT:
Music Appreciation

WINNER:
Bruce “Blue Eyes” Janu, a social science teacher at Riverside-Brookfield High School in Illinois

CREATIVE APPROACH:
When his students misbehave, Mr. Janu enrolls them in his Frank Sinatra Detention Club—he makes them stay after school and listen to his beloved Sinatra albums for half an hour. “You’ve got a Frank,” he tells them.

REACTION:
It works. “The kids hate it,” he says. “This is the worst thing that has ever happened to them.”

The Beta Israel temple in Los Angeles is home to the Shrine of Weeping Shirley Maclaine.

If you’re a fan of detective stories—which includes everything from
The Maltese Falcon
to
The Pink Panther
to
CSI
—then you might be interested in this guy: he was the real thing
.

W
HERE THERE’S SMOKE...

One day in June 1846, Allan Pinkerton, a 27-year-old barrel maker from Dundee, Illinois, climbed onto his raft and floated down the Fox River looking for trees that he could use for lumber. He found a lot more than that—when he went to chop down some trees on an island in the middle of the river, he discovered a smoldering fire pit hidden among them.

If someone found a fire pit in such a beautiful spot today, they probably wouldn’t suspect anything unusual. But as Pinkerton explained in his memoirs, life was different in the 1840s: “There was no picnicking in those days; people had more serious matters to attend to and it required no great keenness to conclude that no honest men were in the habit of occupying the place.”

GOTCHA!

Pinkerton went back to the island a few more times during daylight, but no one was ever there. So a few days later, he snuck back in the middle of the night and waited to see if anyone would show up. After about an hour he heard a rowboat approaching the island. He waited awhile and then crept close to the fire pit to see several shady-looking characters sitting around the campfire.

The next morning he went to the sheriff. After a few nights they went back to the island with a small posse and caught the men by surprise. Pinkerton’s suspicions were correct—the men were a gang of counterfeiters, and the posse caught them red-handed with “a bag of bogus dimes and the tools used in their manufacture.”

Counterfeiting was rampant in the 1840s: In those days each bank issued its own bills, and with so many different kinds of paper floating around, fakes were easy to make and difficult to detect. Less than a month after the dime bust, somebody passed fake $10 bills to two shopkeepers in Dundee. The shopkeepers were pretty sure that a farmer named John Craig had something to do with it, but they had no proof. Pinkerton had done a good job catching the last bunch of counterfeiters, so they asked him to look into it.

A guide dog’s career lasts, on average, 8 to 10 years.

Pinkerton set up a sting: He met Craig, struck up a conversation, and convinced him that he was looking to make some dishonest money on the side. Craig sold him $500 worth of the fake bills, but rather than have the sheriff arrest him right there, Pinkerton decided to bide his time. He got Craig to reveal the location of his headquarters (a hotel in Chicago) then made an appointment to buy more counterfeit bills. A few days later, Pinkerton met Craig in the hotel bar. Then, just as Craig was passing him $4,000 worth of fake bills, two plainclothes police officers stepped out of the shadows and arrested him.

CAREER CHANGE

Had Pinkerton been left alone, he might have remained a barrel maker, but the Craig bust changed everything. “The affair was in everybody’s mouth,” Pinkerton later wrote, “and I suddenly found myself called upon from every quarter to undertake matters of detective skill.” He quit making barrels and worked a number of different law-enforcement jobs over the next few years: deputy sheriff, Chicago police detective (the city’s first), and finally as a U.S. Post Office investigator.

Then in 1850, he decided to go to work for himself—he and a lawyer named Edward Rucker formed what would become the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Rucker dropped out after a year or two, but Pinkerton stayed with it for the rest of his life.