Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (23 page)

TORONTO RAPTORS.
Team executives wanted to use the name Huskies, but when they saw an early logo prototype, they realized it was too similar to the Minnesota Timberwolves’ logo. A contest to name the team was held, and Raptors won. Velociraptors were vicious dinosaurs made famous in the movie
Jurassic Park
, which was released just before Toronto got its basketball team.

Uncle John is amazed—and pleased—by the creative ways people get involved with bathrooms, toilets, toilet paper, and so on. That’s why he created the “Stall of Fame.”

H
onoree:
Petey P. Cup
Notable Achievement:
Becoming the first and only (so far) mascot shaped like a urine sample container
True Story:
He’s nearly seven feet tall, he walks on two legs, and his body is a giant jar of pee. The yellow spokescup (with blue lid) was created by HealthPartners, a Minnesota-based nonprofit health-care organization. Petey’s goal: to “humanize” the company and promote same-day results for urine tests. The campaign is targeted toward “a younger demographic that understands irony, YouTube, and social networking.” (Petey has a Facebook page.) In 2008 HealthPartners announced that Petey would be getting a sidekick—Pokey the Syringe.

Honoree:
Brad Feld, a venture capitalist from Boulder, Colorado

Notable Achievement:
Making a “charitable donation” in a college restroom

True Story:
Feld recently gave $25,000 to the University of Colorado. Now the second floor men’s room in the technology building displays a plaque bearing his name. Underneath is printed this piece of advice: “The best ideas often come at inconvenient times. Don’t ever close your mind to them.” Feld’s first choice was a restroom at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his alma mater, but the school declined. The University of Colorado jumped at the chance and would like to remind people that the women’s room adjacent to Feld’s is still up for grabs.

Honoree:
Sim Jae-duck, a.k.a. “Mr. Toilet,” a South Korean lawmaker and president of the World Toilet Association

Notable Achievement:
Making the best seat in the house into the
entire
house

True Story:
In the town of Suwon, South Korea, Sim tore down his house and in its place built a 24-foot-tall, toilet-shaped building. It’s made of steel, and it’s painted white to resemble porcelain. Even bigger than the toilet house is the reason it was built: to serve as the “headquarters” for the World Toilet Association (not to be confused with the much larger World Toilet Organization), which is dedicated to improving sanitary conditions for the 2.5 billion people who lack access to clean water and bathrooms. Formed in 2007, the WTA held its inaugural meeting at Sim’s toilet house—whose official name is
Haewoojae
, Korean for “a place of sanctuary where one can solve one’s worries.”

Honoree:
Thelma Brittingham, a resident at the Holiday Retirement Village in Evansville, Indiana

Notable Achievement:
Having a birthday party for toilet paper

True Story:
Trying to bring some fun to the home’s senior citizens, Brittingham decided to research the history of toilet paper in the hopes of tracing it back to its date of birth. Her findings: TP was first used in Europe on August 26, 580 A.D. (No word on how she determined that.) So now, each year the retirees put on a birthday party on the special day. Brittingham says, “When some people heard we were celebrating toilet paper’s birthday, they asked me, ‘Have you lost your mind?’” She assured them that she hadn’t.

Honoree:
The city of Wuhan, in China’s Hubei province

Notable Achievement:
Starting a low-cost service for visitors desperately in need of a pit stop

True Story:
For tourists wandering through the crowded city of nearly 10 million people, finding a public restroom can be difficult. But now, they can look for a “toilet guide,” distinguishable by his red arm band. For only 3
jiao
(3.8 cents), a guide will escort you to the nearest restroom. The city employs 10 guides who are paid a daily salary of 10
yuan
($1.29).

Honoree:
Gerardine Botte, director of Ohio University’s Electrochemical Engineering Research Laboratory

Notable Achievement:
Turning pee into power

True Story:
Urine contains ammonia, and ammonia can be broken
down into hydrogen and nitrogen, which can provide energy. So why do the millions of tons of ammonia made by humans and farm animals each year just evaporate in waste treatment plants and in ponds on farms? That’s the question asked—and answered—by Botte and the science whizzes at OU. After a long process of trial and error, the team is perfecting a device called an
electrolyzer
that uses electric current to break down the ammonia into its component parts, which can then be turned into fuel. Within a few years, many waste treatment plants and farm waste ponds may be converted into power plants with an endless supply of raw fuel. The technology may even lead to pee-powered automobiles. One of the most beneficial aspects of ammonia energy: it creates no greenhouse gases, effectively turning one of our dirtiest byproducts into one of our cleanest forms of energy.

“Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.”

—
Napoleon

“Never impose your language on people you wish to reach.”

—
Abbie Hoffman

“Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room.”

—
Winston Churchill

“It’s always a bad practice to say ‘always’ or ‘never.’”

—
Barack Obama

“Never throw mud. You may miss the mark, and you’ll have dirty hands.”

—
Joseph Parker

“Rule #1: Never lose money. Rule #2: Never forget rule #1.”

—
Warren Buffett

Harley Earl is considered one of the three most important figures in the history of the American auto industry (Henry Ford and GM head Alfred Sloan are the other two). Yet other than car buffs, few people have heard of him
.

T
HE HOLLYWOOD KID
In 1925 the General Motors Corporation made plans to begin manufacturing a car called the LaSalle. It would be sold by Cadillac dealerships, but for a price slightly lower than the least expensive Cadillac. Larry Fisher, Cadillac’s general manager, was looking for someone to design it and found his man working in the custom body shop of the Cadillac dealer in Los Angeles: Harley Earl, the son of a Hollywood coach builder who started out building horse-drawn vehicles—actual
coaches
—before switching to automobile bodies in 1908.

Earl, in his early 30s, had acquired a reputation for building one-of-a-kind autos for rich Hollywood movie stars. His car for cowboy star Tom Mix, for example, was painted with stars emblazoned with Mix’s “TM” logo and had a leather saddle on the roof. His car for comedian Fatty Arbuckle, while much more sedate and elegant, cost Arbuckle an incredible $28,000—at a time when a new Ford Model T sold for less than $300.

What really impressed Fisher about Harley Earl wasn’t so much his cars for the stars as it was his method for designing them: Before he built the final product, Earl made full-sized mock-ups of his vehicles using modeling clay. Unlike working with sheet metal or wood, the common technique of other coach builders, clay was quicker and easier to work with. If Earl wasn’t happy with the shape of a door he’d made, for example, instead of spending hours making a new one out of wood or pounding one out by hand from sheet metal, all he had to do was add a little more clay or scrape a little off, repeating the process as often as necessary until he got exactly the look he wanted. The ease of using clay allowed Earl to be very ambitious and creative in his designs, and just as importantly, it allowed him to think of the
car as a single, integrated unit, not a bunch of mechanical components bolted together.

When Earl arrived in Detroit, he set to work designing four different versions of the La Salle: a coupe, a roadster, a sedan, and a touring car. He borrowed heavily from the Hispano-Suiza, a popular European luxury car of the day, and then implemented what would become a lifelong design principle: Longer, lower cars were more appealing to the eye than shorter cars with high rooflines.

Fisher and his boss, GM head Alfred Sloan, were impressed with all four of Earl’s designs and ordered them all into production for the 1927 model year. Those 1927 LaSalles were the very first high-volume, mass-produced cars that had ever been designed by what would become known as a
stylist
, someone who cared as much about how the car looked as he did about how it ran.

Remember, the auto industry was barely 20 years old in 1927, and it had taken all that time just to advance the state of the art to the point where cars were dependable, affordable, and could be mass produced by the hundreds of thousands with no loss of quality. The engineers who had made all of this possible weren’t concerned with what the cars looked like: If buyers wanted a car that looked good on top of everything else, that was what the custom coach builders were for. Cadillac still sold a lot of unfinished cars to these companies—chassis, engine, power train, wheels, radiator, etc., but no body—and coach building firms could spend as much time as they wanted crafting beautiful, luxurious auto bodies by hand.

Those 1927 LaSalles were special cars indeed—they outshone many of the Cadillacs that were supposed to outshine them. Was it their long, low-slung look? Was it their two-tone paint jobs—unheard of in mass-produced cars, which were still mostly available in only dark blue or black? Was it the “Flying Wing” fenders that did it? Those LaSalles flew off the car lots, so impressing GM head Alfred Sloan that he created an entirely new department, the Art and Color Division, to bring GM’s design work in-house, and he brought Harley Earl out from California to run it.

The American auto industry would never be the same again.

Part II of our story is on page 269
.

Proof that crime doesn’t pay
.

H
ANGING OUT
In Aachen, Germany, a sales clerk at a clothing store noticed a man with a pronounced triangle-shaped bulge protruding from underneath the back of his coat. “Do you need any help, sir?” she asked. “No,” he told her. “I won’t be buying anything today.” The clerk quickly alerted security, who caught the man with a stolen suit…still on its clothes hanger. “Only a sign saying ‘Stop me, I’m a thief!’ would have made him look more unprofessional,” said the arresting officer.

In 2008 an 18-year-old man burst into a muffler shop in Chicago wildly waving a gun and demanding money. When informed that only the boss could open the safe, the robber gave the employees his cell phone number and ordered them to call him when the boss returned. Instead, the workers called the police, who sent over a plain clothes officer.
He
called the robber and told him the manager was there. Sure enough, the man returned, again waving his gun around, and the officer shot him in the leg. The robber was arrested, treated for his wound, and sent to jail.

Not wanting to miss his early morning court appearance in Peterborough, Ontario, Donald Baker called the police department the night before and requested a wake-up call. The police were reportedly “amused” that the 51-year-old man would even
think
that was a service they offered. So they decided to run a records check on Baker…and discovered an arrest warrant out on him that they hadn’t known about. When he showed up for court the next morning, he was put in jail instead.