Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (24 page)

H. L.
Mencken (1880–1956) was a writer, editor, and critic for Baltimore newspapers and one of America’s wittiest, and most opinionated political commentators.

1.
Democracy is the theory that intelligence is dangerous. It assumes that no idea can be safe until those who can’t understand it have approved it.

2.
Democracy is the theory that two thieves will steal less than one.

3.
It is a bit hoggish, but it might be worse. It will be centuries before we are ready for anything better.

4.
The principal virtue of democracy is that it makes a good show—one incomparably bizarre, amazing, shocking, and obscene.

5.
Democracy is the liberty of the have-nots. Its aim is to destroy the liberty of the haves.

6.
Democracy is a sort of laughing gas. It will not cure anything, perhaps, but it unquestionably stops the pain.

7.
The Fathers who invented it, if they could return from Hell, would never recognize it. It was conceived as a free government of free men; it has become simply a battle of charlatans for the votes of idiots.

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Here’s
proof that crime doesn’t pay.

“A 19-year-old convenience store employee in Shawnee, Kansas, put tape over the security camera, robbed the till, then called police to report a robbery. But since he used transparent tape to cover the camera, it was easy to see that he was the robber and he was quickly arrested.”

—FHM Magazine

MADRID—“Would-be burglar Pedro Cardona tried to break into a house by squeezing through a doggie door. It was something like putting two pounds of bologna in a one-pound bag as the portly Cardona became wedged in halfway through. Rescuers had to chop the door down with axes to get him out.”

—
Bizarre
News

“A criminal mastermind in a small Iowa town carefully planned a bank robbery and actually got away with the money. But he was arrested the next day at a motel near the state line, only 20 miles away.

“When asked why he had stopped so close to the scene of the crime, he explained that he was on parole and couldn’t cross the state line without permission from his parole officer.”

—The
World’s Dumbest Criminals,
by Daniel Butler

“A man in Brighton, England, jumped out of a taxi without paying and left behind a bag of marijuana. Amazingly, he called the taxi company to inquire about the bag and was told it had been turned over to the police, so he went to the local police station to claim the bag.”

—Chicago
Sun-Times

Lions sleep 17 hours a day.

“Six men were charged with attempting Britain’s biggest cash robbery. According to court testimony, the gang forced an armored car carrying $18.2 million to be driven to a wooded area, then used high-powered torches to open it. But the torches accidentally set off a ‘bonfire’ that burned $2.4 million into ashes and caused the men to flee.”

—
Dumb Crooks

“Seems this guy wanted some beer pretty badly. He decided that he’d just throw a cinder block through a liquor store window, grab some booze, and run. So he lifted the cinder block over his head and heaved it at the window. The cinder block bounced back and hit him on the head, knocking him unconscious. Seems the liquor store window was made of Plexiglas. The whole event was caught on videotape.”

—
Darwin Awards

“A Subway sandwich shop employee in Edmonton, Alberta, somehow managed to activate the burglar alarm and disarm two men who were attempting to rob him at knife point. Scared by the sandwich-maker’s heroics, the felons fled the scene. The Subway employee pursued the would-be thieves, shouting that there was no harm done and that he’d gladly make them free sandwiches if they came back. Amazingly, they did! Police arrived minutes later and arrested the hungry thieves, who were patiently waiting in line for a Cold Cut Trio.”

—
Stuff
magazine

• Subaru Gravel Express

• Suzuki Every Joy Pop Turbo

• Mazda Proceed Marvie

• Isuzu Mysterious Utility Wizard

• Isuzu 20 Giga Light Dump

• Toyota Master Ace Surf

The good old days: 30 million years ago, there were palm trees in Alaska.

Some people call them roadside attractions. We call them tourist traps. Either way, it’s an amazing phenomenon: There’s nothing much to see there, nothing much to do there. Yet tourists go by the millions. Think we could get people to come to Uncle John’s Bowl of Wonder?

Build It…
One summer day in 1936, Dorothy and Ted Hustead had a brilliant idea: they put signs up along U.S. 16 advertising their struggling mom-and-pop drugstore. As an afterthought, they included an offer for free ice water. Wall Drug was situated 10 miles from the entrance to the South Dakota badlands, and on sweltering summer days before air conditioning, the suggestion of free ice water made rickety old Wall Drug seem like an oasis. When Ted got back from putting up the first sign, half a dozen cars were already parked in front of his store.

They’ll Come:
The Husteads knew they were on to something. Ted built an empire of billboards all over the United States, planting signs farther and farther away from his drugstore. There’s a sign in Amsterdam’s train station (only 5,397 miles to Wall Drug); there’s one at the Taj Mahal (10,728 miles to Wall Drug); and there’s even one in Antarctica (only 10,645 miles to Wall Drug).

Today, Wall Drug is an enormous 50,000-square-foot tourist mecca with a 520-seat restaurant and countless specialty and souvenir shops; if it’s hokey, odds are that Wall Drug sells it. They also have a collection of robots, including a singing gorilla and a mechanical Cowboy Orchestra. Wall Drug spends over $300,000 on billboards, but every cent of it pays off. The store lures in 20,000 visitors a day in the summer and grosses more than $11 million each year. And they still give away free ice water—5,000 glasses a day.

Build It…
Driving south on I-95 near the South Carolina border, one object stands out from the landscape: a 200-foot-tall tower with a giant sombrero on top. The colossal hat is Sombrero Tower, centerpiece of the huge South of the Border tourist complex.

Gail Borden (inventor of condensed milk) is buried beneath a headstone shaped like a milk can.

SOB, as the locals call it, began as a beer stand operated by a man named Alan Schafer. When Schafer noticed that his building supplies were being delivered to “Schafer Project: South of the [North Carolina] Border,” a lightbulb lit up over his head and he decided his stand needed a Mexican theme.

They’ll Come:
Today, SOB sprawls over 135 acres and imports—and sells—$1.5 million worth of Mexican merchandise a year. It has a 300-room motel and five restaurants, including the Sombrero Room and Pedro’s Casateria (a fast-food joint shaped like a antebellum mansion with a chicken on the roof). There’s also Pedro’s Rocket City (a fireworks shop), Golf of Mexico (miniature golf), and Pedro’s Pleasure Dome spa. Incredibly, eight million people stop into SOB every year for a little slice of… Mexi-kitsch.

Build It…
When Carl Bruno first toured the towering redwood forests around the DeMartin ranch in 1931, he was awestruck by a handful of oddly deformed trees. Dollar signs in his eyes, Bruno snapped up the property and began luring in travelers to see trees shaped like pretzels and double helixes. He called his attraction Wonderland Park, and for the first 15 years of its existence, it did modest business—but something was missing…

They’ll Come:
He decided the park needed a 49-foot-tall statue of Paul Bunyan. In 1946 Bruno had the massive mythical logger installed near the highway and changed the park’s name to Trees of Mystery. Business began to pick up. He added a companion piece, 35-feet-tall Babe the Blue Ox, in 1949. (When Babe was first introduced, he blew smoke out of his nostrils, which made small children run away screaming. The smoke was discontinued.)

Trees of Mystery prospered and is still open today. It recently added an aerial gondola ride, but the park is primarily a bunch of oddly shaped trees and a tunnel through a giant redwood. The gift shop, which sells cheesy souvenirs and wood carvings, has been hailed as “a model for other tourist attractions.” The park was even honored by
American Heritage
magazine as the best roadside attraction for 2001.

Zip s-l-o-w-l-y: According to researchers, every year 100,000 Americans are injured by their own clothing.

Here are bits and pieces of bathroom trivia we’ve flushed out of the newspapers of the world over the past couple of years.

Germany’s Defense Ministry, which is looking for ways to reduce the country’s military costs, has asked soldiers to use less toilet paper. “Lavatory paper is not always used just in the lavatory, it is often also used to wipe things up,” a spokesperson explained. “We are asking people to think before they wipe.”

Haliburton, the oil services company that Dick Cheney headed before resigning to run for vice president, admitted during the 2000 presidential campaign that the company “maintains separate restrooms overseas for its American and foreign employees.” The company defended its separate-but-equal restroom policy, saying it was done for “cultural reasons,” and that Cheney was “unaware” of the practice during his five years as chief executive.

• The Westminster City Council has decided to erect open-air urinals next to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. “Nighttime revelers, waiting at a bus stop outside the gallery, have been relieving themselves against the new wing,” the council said in a press release. “The gallery now fears that the stone of the building is being affected by uric acid. Urinals will be placed in problem areas where ‘wet spots’ have been identified.”

• From Scotland Yard: “The Department of Professional Standards is investigating an incivility charge arising from the search of a home under the Misuse of Drugs Act. An allegation has been received from a person in the house that one of the male officers broke wind and did not apologize to the family for his action. The complainant felt it was rude and unprofessional.”

Archaeologists exploring the tomb of a king of the Western Han dynasty (206 B.C. to 24 A.D.) have unearthed what they believe is the world’s oldest flush toilet, one that predates the earliest European water closet by as much as 1,800 years. The toilet, which boasts a stone seat, a drain for running water, and even an armrest, “is the earliest of its kind ever discovered in the world,” the archaeologists told China’s official Xinhua news agency, “meaning that the Chinese flushed first.”

In June 2001, the
Milenio
daily newspaper revealed Mexican president Vicente Fox, who was elected on an anticorruption platform, has furnished the Los Pinos presidential palace with “specially embroidered” bath towels that cost $400 apiece. But they’re just a tiny part of the more than $400,000 worth of household items that Fox has purchased during his first six months in office. President Fox admitted to the expenditures and even praised their disclosure by
Milenio,
citing the article as “evidence of progress in bringing transparency to government spending.” (The minimum wage in Mexico, where 40 million people live in poverty, is about $132 a month.)