Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (13 page)

HELLO?

Victim:
Almon Brown Strowger, a Kansas City undertaker

What Happened:
In the late 1880s, a friend of Strowger’s passed away. He expected to get the funeral business, but the call never came. He blamed the local switchboard operator, whom he suspected of steering calls to her husband—a rival undertaker.

Revenge:
Strowger invented the world’s first automatic telephone exchange (and later the first dial telephone), making it possible for people to dial directly, without the help of an operator.

WHERE THE STREETS HAVE HIS NAME

Victim:
Cripple Creek, Colorado

What Happened:
Collier’s
magazine commissioned writer and gourmet Julian Street to write a travel article about Cripple Creek, Colorado. When he arrived in town, Street happened to stroll down Myers Avenue and strike up a conversation with a red-headed woman named Madame Leo, who informed him that he was in the heart of the town’s red-light district. Street described his conversation with the bawdy lady at length in his article. Cripple Creek’s town fathers were humiliated.

Revenge:
They changed the name of Myers Ave. to Julian Street.

What’s worse than a volcanic eruption in your town? A volcanic eruption in your town on Election Day. Here’s one of the strangest events in the history of Western democracy.

One of the worst volcanic disasters in history was caused not by the eruption…but by politics.

Mount Pelée, on the island of Martinique in the Caribbean Sea, began smoking and shaking in late April 1902. The people of St. Pierre, the town at the base of the volcano, remembered that the volcano had rumbled years earlier, but since it had quieted down and was seemingly dormant, they weren’t too concerned…at first.

But when scalding mud flows began pouring down the mountain and ashes fell faster than they could be swept away, many changed their minds and thought the town should be evacuated. As it happened, the city’s elections were only a few days away. The mayor and the governor of the island were concerned about the growing popularity of a radical political party that stood for equal rights for all races and threatened the white supremacy of the island.

Mayor Fouche and Governor Mouttet refused to allow anything to delay the election even a single day. The editor of the paper was on their side and published articles by fictional “volcano experts” who had supposedly examined the situation and said there was no danger.

Soon the volcano became more violent. A giant mudslide wiped out the sugar mill on the edge of town, taking the factory workers with it, and a huge seismic wave spawned by undersea earthquakes wiped out the entire seafront district. People began packing to leave, but found the roads out of town blocked by soldiers sent by the governor. He was determined to prevent anyone from leaving before the election.

The Incas measured time by how long it took a potato to cook.

The people went to the local church and begged the bishop to intervene on their behalf, but he refused to go against the wishes of the state. At dawn on election day, Mount Pelée exploded. A colossal cloud of super-heated gasses, ash, and rock blew out of a notch in the crater, directly at the town four miles away, at a rate of 100 mph. Within three minutes, the entire population—including the mayor, governor, bishop, and newspaper editor—was dead. Even ships anchored offshore were set ablaze, killing crew members and passengers.

Only two people in the town survived. A black prisoner condemned to death for murdering a white man was to have been hanged that day, but the governor had granted him clemency in the hopes that it would give him some of the black vote. The prisoner was being held in an underground cell with one small window facing away from the volcano. He was horribly burned, but survived and later toured with the Barnum and Bailey Circus as a sideshow attraction.

The only other survivor was the town cobbler, a religious fanatic who had been hiding in his cellar, praying, when the mountain erupted. He, too, was terribly burned, and some reports say that he never regained his sanity after coming out of his cellar to find every single one of the townfolk—30,000 people in all—dead.

•
Flugie:
A rule that helps only the rule maker.

•
Bloviate:
To speechify pompously.

•
Speechify:
To deliver a speech in a tedious way.

•
Roorback:
An invented rumor intended to smear an opponent.

•
Bafflegab:
Intentionally confusing jargon.

•
Gobbledygook:
Nonsensical explanation, bafflegab.

•
Snollygoster:
A politician who puts politics ahead of principle.

•
Boondoggle:
Wasteful or crooked government-funded project.

•
Mugwump:
A political maverick.

When you soft-pedal something, you are referring to the piano pedal used to mute the tone.

Here are some creative ways that people have gotten involved with bathrooms, toilets, toilet paper, etc.

Notable Achievement:
Building a pot of gold

True Story:
When Lam Sai Wing was growing up in communist China, he dreamed of someday being rich. He eventually moved to Hong Kong and opened a jewelry store called 3-D Gold and by 2001 had the money to build the toilet of his dreams…out of gold. And he had enough money left over to build an entire bathroom of gold—wash basins, toilet brushes, toilet paper holders, towel holders, mirror frames, doors, even bathroom tiles. He topped it all off with a ceiling encrusted with precious gems. Total cost: $4.9 million, which Lam offsets by charging admission to the bathroom. Peeking into the restroom costs $4; to use the facilities, you have to spend at least $138 in the store.

Honoree:
Greg Kotis, an inspired playwright

Notable Achievement:
Writing a musical about urinals…and actually making it onto Broadway

True Story:
Trying to live in Paris on $4 a day, Kotis slept on park benches and often had to choose between eating and using the city’s pay urinals. One rainy afternoon while making such a choice (he chose food), a thought occurred to him: What if a single evil corporation—the Urine Good Company—controlled all of the pay urinals in a city?

“I just stood there maybe fifteen minutes. In the rain. Thinking it out,” he says. Inspired, he wrote a play called
Urinetown, The Musical.
After a sold-out off-Broadway run, it opened on the Great White Way in September 2001. Highlight: A song called “It’s a Privilege to Pee.”

Honoree:
Carl Rennie Davis, a pub owner in Stourbridge, England

Elvis had a pet monkey named Scatter.

Notable Achievement:
Converting his men’s room urinals into an electronic arcade game…of sorts

True Story:
Davis installed paddle wheels in the drainpipes of his men’s room urinals; then he hooked each one up to a row of vertical lights. How many lights flash depends on how long—and how “strong”—a person uses the urinal. Customers can compete to see who can light the most lights, and because extra rows of lights are mounted over the bar, ladies in the pub can follow the action.

Honoree:
The Kimberly-Clark company

Notable Achievement:
Building a better toilet paper roll

True Story:
How can you improve on a classic? Kimberly-Clark took out the cardboard tube and made it a solid block of toilet paper. Now it’s “coreless”! Here’s the good news: The new roll has twice as much paper, so you change it half as often. Now, the bad news: It requires a special kind of dispenser and you can’t have one—so far, they’re strictly for commercial use in offices and restaurants. Maybe someday…

Honoree:
Bob Ernst, a playwright and high school drama teacher in San Francisco

Notable Achievement:
Writing and producing the only play ever staged in a bathroom

True Story:
Ernst, 56, wrote a one-act play called
The John,
about a man named Alvin who meets Death in a theater men’s room during an intermission of “King Lear.” He staged the play in a men’s room in the basement of the Maritime Hall in San Francisco, which he booked for $100 a day. Ernst, who plays both Alvin and Death, performed in front of 20 spectators who sat on folding chairs wedged into the space between the second and fourth stalls.

Why write a play that takes place in a bathroom? “Death can happen anywhere, anytime,” Ernst says. “Elvis died in a john, you know. One minute you’re here, the next you’re gone. That’s the way it is.”

Z-z-z-z: There are more than 300 patents on anti-snoring devices. Z-z-z-z.

Sit. Fetch. Roll over. Even more interesting than watching animals perform tricks we teach them, is watching what they do naturally. This list of truly amazing facts about animals was compiled by BRI staffer Taylor Clark.

• The world’s longest earthworms—found only in a small corner of Australia—can grow to as long as 12 feet and as thick as a soda can.

• Ancient Romans trained elephants to perform on a tightrope.

• Squids have the largest eyes in nature—up to 16 inches across.

• Australia’s mallee bird can tell temperature with its tongue, accurate to within two degrees.

• Not only does the three-toed sloth sleep 20 hours a day, it also spends most of its life upside down.

• Most kangaroo rats never drink water.

• The chamois—a goatlike mountain antelope—can balance on a point of rock the size of a quarter.

• Robins become drunk after eating holly berries and often fall off power lines.

• Octopus eyes resemble human eyes—the U.S. Air Force once taught an octopus to “read” by distinguishing letterlike shapes.

• A woodpecker’s beak moves at a speed of 100 mph.

• By using air currents to keep it aloft, an albatross may fly up to 87,000 mi. on a single feeding trip without ever touching the ground. That’s more than three times around the Earth.

• Polar bears are so perfectly insulated from the cold that they spend most of their time trying to cool down.

• Whales can communicate with each other from over 3,000 miles away (but the message takes over an hour to get there).

• Domesticated elephants have learned to stuff mud into the cowbells around their necks before sneaking out at night to steal bananas.

• A mouse has more bones than a human.

In 1977 New York hunters killed 83,204 deer…and 7 fellow hunters.

In 1886 a man named Carl Graham rode a barrel through the rapids below Niagara Falls, starting a craze of riding the rapids in barrels. Soon, people started looking for a bigger challenge
—
riding the falls.

There are three individual falls at Niagara. At American Falls, 300 tons of water drop 180 feet per second and boulders as big as houses litter the base. No one has ever survived a trip over it. Luna Falls, only 90 feet wide, is too small to ride. At Horseshoe Falls, 2,700 tons of water pass over every second. Rocks cannot withstand the constant onslaught of water, boulders are pulverized. But there is a deep plunge pool at the bottom, making it the only fall that can be ridden.

Here are the people who have dared to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel:

•
Annie Edson Taylor
(1901). The first person ever to go over Niagara in a barrel, this widowed, unemployed schoolteacher was 63 years old when she did it. She used an oak wine barrel padded with cushions. After the plunge, she spent 17 minutes bobbing around before assistants pulled her ashore. Emerging dazed but unhurt, she said, “No one ought ever do that again.” She was incoherent for several days afterward.