Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (43 page)

On a fondue set:
When all family members are seated around the table, dishes are all the more tasteful. If dishes are nice, the square ceiling becomes round.

Advertisement for a restaurant:
No one really goes to Aqua Bar for the drinks, but we make sure our drinks won’t kill you.

On a paper coffee cup:
The Art of Hot. Side by side, I’ll be yours forever. Because please don’t weep.

Sign for Café Miami:
We established a fine coffee. What everybody can say TASTY! It’s fresh, so-mild. With some special coffee’s bitter and sourtaste. “LET’S HAVE SUCH A COFFEE! NOW!” is our selling copy. Please love Café Miami.

On a coat label:
Have a good time! Refreshed and foppish sense and comfortable and fresh styles will catch you who belong to city-groups. All the way.

Good thing they’re hauling gas: Giant oil tankers get about 31 feet per gallon.

On a package of prawn-flavored crackers:
Once you have opened the packing it will be entirely impossible for you to suppress the desire to overcome such exciting challenge of your tongue. However, don’t be disappointed with your repeated failure, you may continue with your habit.

In a Honda repair manual:
No touching earth wire, fatal eventuarity may incur.

On a toothbrush box:
Gives you strong mouth and refreshing wind!

On a package of bath salts:

Humanity are fighting against tired. Charley support you.

On a washing machine:
Push button. Foam coming plenty. Big Noise. Finish.

On the front of a datebook:
Have a smell of panda droppings. This one is very fragrant.

On children’s play microphone:
Mom ma! Pap Pap! I and Lady Employees to play with it together!

On a photo developing envelope:
Takes the thirst out of everyday time. A pure whiff of oxygen, painting over a monochrome world in primary colors. We all know that. It’s why everyone loves fruit.

In Pompeii, the walls of every building were used as billboards on which anyone was allowed to write whatever they wanted. When the buried city was excavated, archaeologists found notices of upcoming plays at the theater, the schedule of games at the stadium, the price of goods in the market, and the comments of passersby. One message declared, “Everybody writes on walls but me.”

The elections in Pompeii were coming up when the city was destroyed, so thousands of political ads were found, including this one: “Vote for Vatia, who is recommended by sneak thieves, the whole company of late drinkers, and everyone who is fast asleep.”

Pigeons have three sets of eyelids.

For people who grew up on John Wayne movies, where the cavalry always fought the Indians, this may be hard to believe, but Canada’s cavalry, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was actually started to
protect
the Native Americans. Here’s the story.

Canada only became an independent nation in 1867. After the American Civil War, the British colonies that now form Canada viewed the U.S. as a potential threat: America was a powerful nation, equipped with the tools of war and possibly willing to use them to annex Canada. Already, several fur-trading forts had been established in Western Canada and some were even flying flags that resembled the American flag. These traders posed a real threat to Canadian sovereignty, because the prairie border was not firmly established or enforced at that time. For their own protection, the colonies banded together as a single Dominion of the British Crown.

The newly formed Canadian government knew it needed a national police force to maintain friendly relations with Native American tribes and to maintain the borders at the Western territories. But there were other pressing matters, so the organization of such a police force was repeatedly postponed.

In May 1873, a group of hunters from Fort Benton, Montana, crossed the Canadian border in search of animal pelts. One night while they slept, a band of thieves invaded their camp and stole their horses. When the hunters awoke, they were furious. They followed the tracks to the Cypress Hills in Saskatchewan and confronted a local tribe, the Assiniboine. The tribe didn’t have the horses, but the hunters wanted revenge and cared little who paid for it. They raped the Assiniboine women and massacred most of the tribe.

When news of the Cypress Hills Massacre reached the east, government officials were appalled. Organizing a police force to patrol
the western territories immediately became the Dominion’s top priority.

Man about town: George Washington’s name has been given to 1 state, 7 mountains, 8 streams, 9 colleges, 10 lakes, 33 counties, and 121 towns across the world.

The government sought an educated group of men with “good moral character.” By September, the recruits, called the North West Mounted Police, or “Mounties” for short, totaled 300 men. Mounted on horseback and wearing scarlet coats that mimicked the uniforms of British soldiers, the new force was stationed throughout western Canada. Their primary job: To stop Americans from slaughtering game and selling whiskey to native tribes.

By protecting the First Peoples (as the native tribes are now known) from U.S. poachers and expansionists, the Mounties quickly became friends with the Canadian Indians. In fact, by the early 1890s, there was almost no need for a mounted police force. Then gold was discovered in the Yukon.

By 1899 thousands of Canadian and U.S. citizens had invaded the Yukon in search of gold. The Mounties dispatched 250 officers to the Yukon to keep the peace and again protect Canadian sovereignty. American prospectors returning home told stories of the courageous officers on horseback who managed the potentially explosive situation with an iron fist. The romantic image appealed to newspapers, which, in turn, inspired Hollywood. Then came “Sergeant Preston of the Yukon” on radio, in comic books, and on television. The Mounties had become a Canadian icon.

• The Royal Canadian Mounted Police aren’t mounted anymore, and they haven’t been since 1966, when routine equestrian training was abandoned.

• Mounties are still issued the traditional scarlet jacket, blue jodhpur pants with gold stripes, and brown Mountie hat. But they only wear them on ceremonial occasions; most of the time they just wear standard police uniforms.

• “We always get our man” is not the RCMP motto and never has been. The phrase was invented in 1877 by an American reporter. Their real motto: “Maintain the Right.”

• For that matter, Mounties don’t even call themselves “Mounties.” They prefer to think of themselves as “the Force.”

Palindromes are phrases or sentences that are spelled the same way backward and forward. Who comes up with these things? Don’t they have jobs…or families…or any other way to spend their time? Well, whether they’re weird or not, we’re hooked. Here are some of Uncle John’s favorites.

Ana, nab a banana.

Campus motto: Bottoms up, Mac!

Dog doo! Good God!

No, Mel Gibson is a casino’s big lemon.

Pasadena, Ned—ASAP!

Straw? No, too stupid a fad. I put soot on warts.

Too far, Edna, we wander afoot

He lived as a devil, eh?

Pull up, Eva, we’re here! Wave! Pull up!

I saw desserts; I’d no lemons, alas no melon. Distressed was I.

Marge lets Norah see Sharon’s telegram.

Ned, go gag Ogden.

No evil Shahs live on.

No lemons, no melon.

Now, sir, a war is won!

A dog! A panic in a pagoda!

Star? Come, Donna Melba, I’m an amiable man—no Democrats!

Step on hose-pipes? Oh no, pets.

Too bad, I hid a boot.

Was it a rat I saw?

We’ll let Dad tell Lew.

Kay, a red nude, peeped under a yak.

Yawn. Madonna fan? No damn way.

Red rum, sir, is murder.

Don’t nod.

Some men interpret nine memos.

Dammit, I’m mad!

Ed, I saw Harpo Marx ram Oprah W. aside.

Evil I did dwell, lewd did I live.

Gert, I saw Ron avoid a radio-van—or was it Reg?

Lew, Otto has a hot towel!

Lonely Tylenol.

O, stone, be not so.

Re-paper.

So, G. Rivera’s tots are Virgos.

Too hot to hoot.

Was it Eliot’s toilet I saw?

In 1939 Gerald Ford appeared in
Look
magazine, modeling ski clothing.

Here’s an example of what happens when families are more interested in money and power than they are in each other.

The Contestants:
Child actor Macaulay Culkin, his father and onetime manager, Kit Culkin, and his mother, Patricia Brentrup.

The Feud:
Culkin and Brentrup and their seven children were living in a one-room tenement when Macaulay was cast in the 1990 film Home
Alone.
Nine-year-old Macaulay suddenly found himself the biggest Hollywood child star since Shirley Temple.

“Big Mac” made only $100,000 on Home
Alone,
but made $27 million on Home
Alone 2
and went on to command huge salaries in the other roles his father chose for him. But nearly all the films that followed (The
Pagemaster, Getting Even with Dad,
and Richie Rich) were flops, and Kit Culken, “universally reviled as the stage father from hell,” had burned his bridges with just about every director in Hollywood. Not that it really mattered: by 1995 the 14-year-old Macaulay was so burned out—having made 14 films in less than 10 years—that he told his parents he was through with movies. “I’d been wanting to stop since I was about eleven,” he says.

As if his career problems weren’t enough, Macaulay’s parents split up and began a long and ugly battle for custody of the children, which included control of Macaulay’s estimated $50 million in assets. Brentrup accused Kit Culkin of punching her when she was pregnant and threatening to toss her off a balcony; he accused her of being an adulterous drunk who neglected her children. Brentrup eventually won custody of the kids, and in 1997 a judge awarded oversight of Macaulay’s assets to his accountant.

And the Winner Is:
Macaulay, sort of: He still has plenty of cash in the bank, and after a four-year break from acting, landed the lead in a play in London’s West End. As of October 2000, he and his father had not seen or spoken to each other for nearly four years. “Hopefully someday he’ll realize some of the things he’s done,” Culkin says. “But I understand my parents put me in the financial position where I am today, and I’m grateful for that.”

Male monkeys go bald just like men.

“Common knowledge” is frequently wrong. Here are some examples of things that many people believe… but that according to our sources, just aren’t true.

M
yth:
“Give me a home where the buffalo roam, and the deer and the antelope play…”

Fact:
There are no antelope in North America. The animal the song probably refers to is the pronghorn, which resembles an antelope. Real antelope only live in Asia and Africa.

Myth:
The forbidden fruit eaten by Eve was an apple.

Fact:
The Bible makes reference to the “fruit of the tree” (Genesis 3:3), but names no particular fruit. Horticulturists say that apple trees have never grown in the area where the Garden of Eden supposedly existed. She probably ate a pomegranate.