Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (28 page)

JoAnn, Melinda, and Monica each purchased a new home in
Porcelain Estates, an exclusive community consisting of nine shiny houses. But the builders forgot to add an important part to the houses, forcing the three new homeowners to buy the part at the hardware store. One thousand would have cost $4.00. Fifty would have cost $2.00. But JoAnn, Melinda, and Monica needed only one each and paid a combined total of $3.00. What did the builders forget to add?

Two-eff Jeff was sitting in a chair in the middle of the room. One-eff Jef walked up and said, “I’ll bet you a dollar that before I run around your chair three times, you’ll get up. And I promise I won’t push you or throw things at you. When you get up, it will be by choice.” Two-eff Jeff took the bet, thinking he’d make an easy dollar. But it was soon obvious that One-eff Jef had won. Why?

Amy challenged us with this classic riddle:

Black as night I’ll always be,
Until my mother smothers me.
Then clear as ice I will become
In the rough. Thank you, Mum!
What am I?

Thom drove all the way from Crappo, Maryland, to Flushing, New York, without realizing his car had a flat tire, but arrived safely with four fully inflated tires. How?

Trying to figure out the answers to these questions tired us out, but then along came Angie with a large pot of freshly brewed coffee. Yay! “I can give you one gallon,” she said. “But you’ll have to measure it out yourselves.” Then she handed us a three-gallon bucket and a five-gallon bucket. As we were sitting there dumfounded, Maggie told us not to worry—she’d do it. How?

While telling a true story, Hollywood often strays from the truth, embellishing some facts while omitting others. Here are some inconsistencies we found in major motion pictures
.

M
ovie:
The Pursuit of Happyness
(2006)
Reel Story: Homeless father Chris Gardner (played by Will Smith) is trying to turn his life around. He wows an employee of a stockbrokerage by solving a Rubik’s Cube in a few seconds, earning a place in the company’s prestigious training program. As he goes through the program, Gardner and his nine-year-old son sleep in churches and the subway. After he nearly misses his big final interview because of too many outstanding parking tickets, Gardner finally lands the stockbroker job.

Real Story:
Gardner is a real person and he was indeed homeless while in the training program, but he never had his son with him—he didn’t even know where the boy was (he was with his mother). The Rubik’s Cube incident was pure Hollywood invention, and while Gardner actually was arrested right before his final interview, it wasn’t for parking tickets. It was for spousal abuse.

Movie:
Good Morning, Vietnam
(1987)

Reel Story:
Deejay Adrian Cronauer (Robin Williams) is drafted into the Army and sent to serve in Vietnam. He is put to work as a disc jockey on Armed Forces Radio, where he delivers long antiwar and antiestablishment (but funny) rants in between songs, ultimately leading to a dishonorable discharge.

Real Story:
Only the basics of Cronauer’s story were used—he was a deejay sent to Vietnam, where he worked as a deejay. The zany, antiwar diatribes were added by screenwriters to suit the comic style of Robin Williams. Cronauer says he never performed any humorous or political monologues because 1) it would have gotten him court-martialed, and 2) he wasn’t antiwar. He was never kicked out of the Army—he merely returned home to Pennsylvania when his tour of duty in Vietnam ended. Cronauer calls himself a life
long Republican and he even served on President Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign.

Movie:
Mask
(1985)

Reel Story:
Rocky Dennis (Eric Stoltz) is a teenager with a fatal genetic disorder called
craniodiaphyseal dysplasia
. Calcium buildup in his skull makes his head twice the normal size and causes extreme facial disfigurement. Toward the end of the movie, Dennis gets a job as a counselor at a camp for the blind. He falls in love with a blind girl (Laura Dern) and, having experienced love, dies peacefully.

Real Story:
Sadly, the most romantic part of the film is pure fabrication. Dennis never worked at a camp for blind kids and never fell in love with a blind girl. In fact, as a result of his condition, Dennis himself was legally blind from the age of six.

Movie:
Capote
(2005)

Reel Story:
This portrayal of Truman Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman) details Capote’s writing of
In Cold Blood
, a book about a brutal murder in Kansas. The title card at the end of the film states that “
In Cold Blood
made Truman Capote the most famous writer in America. He never finished another book.”

Real Story:
While it’s debatable that Capote was the “most famous writer in America,” the statement that he never finished another book is simply false. In addition to short stories, newspaper articles, and several anthologies, Capote published several short novels after
In Cold Blood
.

Movie:
Rudy
(1993)

Reel Story:
Daniel “Rudy” Ruettiger (Sean Astin) dreams of playing football for Notre Dame. Despite his small stature he makes it onto the team in his senior year. But the coach who let him on the team is replaced by Dan Devine (Chelcie Ross), who won’t let Rudy play. In the last game of the year, the rest of the team refuses to play unless Rudy gets to play, too. Rudy plays, Rudy sacks the quarterback, Notre Dame wins.

Real Story:
Notre Dame players never staged a protest—Devine actually insisted that Rudy play in that last game.

We bet you’ll cover your mouth at least once while reading these disturbing dentist stories
.

I
n February 2007, police were called to an Ossining, New York, apartment, and after busting down the door found a dental chair, lights, drills, syringes, painkillers, and even a schedule book (but no sterilization equipment). The tenant of the apartment, Alfonso Ruiz-Molina, 40, who is not a dentist—but played one on actual patients in the apartment—was arrested.

• Dr. George Trusty of Syracuse, New York, was working in his office one day in late 2004 when a song he liked came on the radio. He started dancing. Bad idea: He was drilling into 31-year-old Brandy Fanning’s teeth at the time. The drill bit broke and flew into Fanning’s upper mouth and into her sinus, lodging near her eye socket. She needed emergency surgery to remove the bit before it could blind her. She sued Dr. Trusty for $600,000.

• In 2007 Roger Bean, 60, of West Palm Beach, Florida, was arrested for running a denture-making business…in his garage, which police described as “filthy.” “Shame on me for doing what I do,” Bean said, “but I always felt like I was born with the gift to do it.” Police said they later received several calls from people who “wanted their teeth back,” including one man who had only two real teeth and said he couldn’t eat without his dentures.

• By April 2007, Dr. Alan Hutchinson had been practicing dentistry in London, England, for more than 28 years. And during that time, according to a police report, Hutchinson did not regularly wash his hands—and often worked without gloves. It gets worse: The 51-year-old routinely used dental tools to clean his fingernails and ears. And worse: A dental nurse who worked for him for 16 years said she had, on more than one occasion, caught him urinating in his dental sink. She said that she never said anything because she was too embarrassed. Hutchinson was banned from ever practicing medicine in the U.K. again.

All your knuckle kneeds met right here—at KnuckleMart
.

K
NUCKLE SCIENCE
Do your knuckles actually “crack”? Not really. Here’s what’s going on: Your knuckles, like all the joints in your body, are surrounded by a sac of thick, clear
synovial fluid
. When you stretch the bones of a joint apart, as you do when you crack your knuckles, the sac is stretched. That reduces the pressure in the sac, which causes bubbles to be formed. Stretch it far enough, and the pressure drops low enough for the bubbles to burst—resulting in the loud “pop.”

• You’ve probably noticed that once you’ve cracked a knuckle, you can’t do it again for some time afterward. That’s because it takes time for the bubbles to dissolve back into the fluid…usually about a half hour. (According to experts, you can crack them as often as you want—the notion that it is harmful to your joints is an old wives’ tale.)

• “Knuckle-walking” is the name for a type of locomotion used by some animals, such as gorillas and chimpanzees. It’s a form of
quadrupedalism
, or walking on four limbs (as opposed to our two-legged
bipedalism)
, and involves putting weight on the knuckles of the front limbs when walking. Other animals that use it include the giant anteater and the platypus.

The origin of the word
knuckle
goes back more than 2,000 years to Proto-Germanic, the precursor of all Germanic languages, and the word
knoke
, meaning “bone.” Somewhere along the line, the German word
knöchel
came to mean “little bone” and in the 1300s migrated to the English language as
knokel
, or
knuckle
, referring specifically to the finger joints.

• To “knuckle down,” meaning to apply oneself earnestly, entered the dictionary in 1864 and is believed to have come from the game of marbles, where shooting required one’s knuckles to be on the ground.

• To “knuckle under,” meaning to submit or admit defeat, first appeared in 1869 and most likely was derived from the image of a person bent or kneeling with their knuckles on the ground.

• “Knuckleballs” showed up in baseball around 1910. They’re so-called because the ball is held in a bent-fingered, knuckle grip when thrown, making it fly with very little or no spin and therefore erratically.

• The word “knucklehead,” meaning a not very bright person, was coined in 1942…by the Three Stooges. It’s also the nickname of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle style, known by its distinctive ribbed and knobby engine heads, which someone apparently thought looked like knuckles.

• Knucklehead Smiff was the name of the knuckleheaded dummy used by ventriloquist Paul Winchell in his 1950s and ’60s TV shows.

•
Knuckle
is the name of both a 1975 TV movie starring Eileen Brennan and a 1989 BBC film starring Emma Thompson and Tim Roth.

• A “white knuckle” experience, or a white knuckle thrill ride or film, is one that has you gripping the arms of your seat so tightly that the blood leaves your knuckles and they look white. The exact origin of the phrase is unknown.

• The British expression “near the knuckle” refers to anything that is more than a little sexually suggestive or risqué. For example, “I thought his jokes were a bit near the knuckle, considering that the audience was mostly five-year-olds.”

• “Pork knuckles” aren’t knuckles. They’re the pig’s forefeet and ankles (along with the meat around them, of course). “Beef knuckles” actually come from the hind legs, above the kneecap.

• Are the joints of your toes called “toe knuckles”? They are by some people, and since they don’t have a nickname like the finger joints do, we here at the Bathroom Readers’ Institute say, “Why not? ‘Toe knuckles’ it is.”

If you know anybody who believes in these wacky theories, please send them our way. We have an invisible bridge we’d like to sell them
.

G
eorge W. Bush was the inspiration for Curious George
! Conspiracy Theory: George W. Bush was a curious child who was constantly getting into trouble. Margret and H. A. Rey, friends of Bush’s parents, wrote a series of books about a mischievous monkey who they named
Curious George
after young Bush. The books were immensely popular, but Bush didn’t learn that he was the inspiration for the character until 2006, when he was already president of the United States (his father told him). Facing low approval ratings and a public perception of being dim-witted, Bush was embarrassed and outraged. To prevent the information from leaking out, he ordered the Reys killed. When he found out they’d both been dead for years, Bush ordered the murder of Alan Shalleck, owner of the movie rights to
Curious George
and producer of the 2006
Curious George
film.

The Truth:
It’s impossible for Bush to have been the inspiration for
Curious George
. The Reys never met the Bush family, and they wrote their first book in 1939, seven years before Bush was born. Alan Shalleck was a real person: He wrote several episodes of a
Curious George
TV series in the 1980s, but he wasn’t a producer on the
Curious George
movie. And he was murdered, but not by Bush. He was found dead in his Florida home in February 2006, the victim of a botched robbery.