Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (14 page)
Read Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
What Happened:
The video was posted online a few hours after the fight. It must have struck a chord with people’s own memories of childhood bullying, because by the end of the week it had spread worldwide. Casey, a loner who says he’s been bullied at school for years, suddenly had millions of admirers, including more than 230,000 on Facebook alone.
Update:
Casey and Ritchard were both suspended from school for four days. At last report Casey was transferring to another school; Ritchard blames Casey for provoking him and refuses to admit responsibility for starting the fight. (The families of both kids received $40,000 apiece for letting them be interviewed on TV.)
Bill Murray has played funny and bizarre characters in
Stripes, Caddyshack,
and
Ghostbusters
. His weirdest role: real-life Bill Murray
.
N
O ONE WILL EVER BELIEVE YOU...
A “Bill Murray story” is a type of personal urban legend. It begins as a plausible description of an ordinary event on an ordinary day or night, but then veers into the surreal when Murray shows up and does something outrageous or absurd. It ends with him saying something to the effect of, “No one will ever believe you.” And then he disappears. Here are some classic Bill Murray stories that have been circulating via word of mouth and the Internet for years.
• “My freshman year of college, I was hanging out in my dorm room with some friends playing Xbox when I hear this deep-pitched meowing coming from outside my window. I look outside, and there’s
Bill Murray
, clinging to a branch about 10 feet up in the air, meowing at a kitten stuck in the tree. Then he looked at me and said, ‘No one will ever believe you.’ Then he climbed down the tree and ran off.”
• “So I was visiting my friend out in Santa Monica. She works the reception desk at this upscale hotel and she’s always telling me stories about which celebrity is there that week. Anyway, she was on break and we were having dinner together in the bar when
Bill Murray
walks up, leans over, and picks a piece of potato off my plate with his bare fingers and just pops it in his mouth. I just sort of stare at him and he’s looking me right in the eye and smiling as he chews and swallows. And you know what the best part is? He finally says, ‘No one will ever believe you.’ And he walks away.”
...NOR SHOULD THEY
While Murray is an eccentric person, the truth is that these stories, which have been making the rounds for over a decade, probably never happened. Or maybe one or two of them did. But that’s the nature of tall-tale-telling: The stories are so absurd, they couldn’t possibly be true, but they
might
be true.
Wishful thinking? In North Korea, large nursery schools are called “palaces.”
Or maybe they used to be not true...but now they are. In this age of the camera phone and instant Internet distribution, Bill Murray has now been spotted
and recorded
doing crazy things. Whether the following sightings are Murray trying to make an urban legend come true, or he’s just a weird guy doing funny things, is known only to Murray himself.
• MURRAY TENDS BAR WITH THE WU-TANG CLAN
During the 2010 SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, Murray showed up at the crowded Shangri-La bar with RZA and GZA of the legendary rap group the Wu-Tang Clan. Murray pushed his way behind the bar and began taking orders. But no matter what starstuck patrons ordered, Murray poured them shots of tequila. Then he ran off.
• MURRAY READS POETRY TO BUILDERS
In 2009, while construction workers were busy putting the finishing touches on the Poets House Library and Literary Center in lower Manhattan, Murray stopped by to read the workers some poetry. After a straight-faced recital of former poet laureate Billy Collins’s “Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House,” Murray told his confused audience (a small crowd had gathered), “They get worse, so if you want to lie down, get sick, or take a sick day, do it now.” He then read poems by Lorine Niedecker and Emily Dickinson, among others. When he finished, he told the crew, “You have about three minutes left on this break, so smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em.” Then he ran off.
• MURRAY WASHES DISHES AT A HOUSE PARTY
In the 2003 film
Lost in Translation
, Murray played a Hollywood actor who forms an unlikely friendship with a younger woman in a foreign city (Tokyo). In a case of life imitating art, while in Scotland in 2006 for a celebrity golf tournament, the 56-year-old actor met a pretty 22-year-old Norwegian university student named Lykke Stavnef in a pub. Stavnef invited Murray to attend a local house party with her. Murray surprised her by accepting. The incident was witnessed by dozens of partygoers and reported in the U.K.’s
Sunday Times
. The party got crowded as word spread that he was there, and he became concerned that there weren’t enough clean glasses for all the guests, so he began hand washing the stack of dishes that had piled up in the sink. Then he ran off.
Road hogs: Before crash-test dummies, pig cadavers were used to simulate accident victims.
Profound thoughts from some of the world’s most respected thinkers
.
“Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first overcome.”
—
Samuel Johnson
“To love and win is the best thing; to love and lose the next best.”
—
William Makepeace Thackeray
“Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.”
—
Marie Curie
“Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eye for an instant?”
—
Henry David Thoreau
“The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved, loved for ourselves, or rather loved in spite of ourselves.”
—
Victor Hugo
“Everyone has a talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark places where it leads.”
—
Erica Jong
“You don’t get to choose how you’re going to die or when. You can only decide on how you are going to live now.”
—
Joan Baez
“Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.”
—
The Dalai Lama
“The possible’s slow fuse is lit by the imagination.”
—
Emily Dickinson
“It is not true that love makes all things easy; it makes us choose what is difficult.”
—
George Eliot
“Hope awakens courage. He who can implant courage in the human soul is the best physician.”
—
Karl Von Knebel
“To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.”
—
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Florida’s official state gem, the moonstone, is not native to Florida.
It’s a good thing that we at the BRI never make any typos, or it would be really embarrassing to call out these folks for getting one little letter rong
.
•
MICHIGAN ELECTION OFFICIALS
missed it by one letter in 2006, when they printed 180,000 mail-in ballots that used the word “pubic” where “public” should have been. By the time the error was caught (by an election clerk
after
a professional proofreader missed it), 10,000 ballots had already been mailed out. The remaining 170,000 ballots were reprinted at taxpayers’ expense. Total cost: $40,000.
•
PEDRO URZUA LIZANA
missed it by one letter when he chiseled a new design for Chile’s 50-peso coin in 2008. In his rush to finish on time, he accidentally left off the bottom stroke of the “L” in “CHILE.” Result: 1.5 million coins—all in circulation—are inscribed with “REPUBLIC DE CHIIE.” Lizana was fired.
•
DAVID BECKHAM
missed it by one letter when he gave the Hindi translation of his wife’s name to a tattoo artist. It was supposed to be “Victoria,” but instead it said “Vihctoria,” which is what ended up (in huge letters) on the soccer star’s right forearm.
•
ERIC SCHMIDT
missed it by one letter on his business card when he called himself “Chariman of the Executive Committee.” (If you missed it, read that first word again.) If only there were some Internet search engine that he could have used to find a good spell-checking program. (Schmidt was the CEO of Google.)
•
THE GEORGIA DEPARTMENT OF LABOR
missed it by one letter when a clerk sent a business license application to a carpet-cleaning company called Rug Suckers. But the package wasn’t addressed to “Rug Suckers”—it was...something
very
naughty. The company’s owner, Pepper Powell, called the Labor Department to complain, only to be told by the clerk, “I understood you to say that the company’s name was Rug *uckers. I asked you twice and you replied, ‘Yes, it was.’” Powell told the clerk that he would never dream of giving his company such a foul name. “What would be the point?” Georgia Labor officials agreed. They issued an apology and reprimanded the worker.
Lewis & Clark left with 34 people, and came back with 33. (One died of a ruptured appendix.)
•
STRATFORD HALL
, a personalized holiday card company, missed it by one letter on the cover of its 2007 catalog: “Reliability: always upholding the highest standards for every detal.”
•
THE VICTORIA, B.C., PARKS & REC DEPARTMENT
missed it by one letter when it unveiled a statue of Emily Carr (1871–1945), an influential post-impressionist landscape painter and a hometown hero. Apparently nobody proofread the plaque that accompanies the $400,000 statue, which is cast with this inscription: “Dedicated to honour Victoria’s best know citizen.”
•
KTXL-FOX40 SACRAMENTO
missed it by one letter in 2011 when it ran a graphic during a breaking news story that read “Obama Bin Laden Dead.”
•
THE TORRANCE PRESS
, a newspaper in Southern California, missed it by one letter on a two-page advertisement: “Sleeping on a Sealy Is Like Sleeping on a Clod.” Sealy terminated their contract. (That was the ad department’s
second
chance with its potentially lucrative new client. A day earlier, the
Torrance Press
ran an ad that read, “Sleeping on a Sealy Is Like Slipping on a Cloud.”)
•
E.S. GAFFNEY
missed it by one letter while working at the U.S. Department of Energy. She submitted a proposal to an official whose last name is Prono, but Microsoft Word’s auto-correct feature changed it to “Porno.” Gaffney’s proposal was rejected.
•
THE MOSCOW-PULLMAN DAILY NEWS
in Idaho missed it by one letter when it printed a recipe for a “Bowel Full of Brownies.” (Does that make it a “typoo”?)
Henry Fonda took acting lessons from Marlon Brando’s mother.
Trivia you don’t know about the songs you definitely
do
know
.
“P
enny Lane”:
The song described real locations in
Liverpool. Or at least they
were
real—the street called Penny Lane is no longer there, although the barber, banker, and “shelter in the middle of the roundabout” still stand. The barber and banker are still a barber and banker; the shelter is now a coffee shop.
“Eleanor Rigby”:
A statue of the song’s subject sits on a bench on Stanley Street in Liverpool. It was sculpted by Tommy Steele, a 1950s British rock star, who gave it to the city in 1982. Unlike the song’s Eleanor Rigby, each year several thousand people “come near” the statue, which is dedicated to “all the lonely people.”
“Dear Prudence”:
John Lennon met Prudence Farrow—actress Mia Farrow’s sister—on a spiritual retreat with the Maharishi in India. She seemed very depressed when she arrived there, so Lennon wrote this song in an attempt to cheer her up. (She later said that she was neither sad nor despondent, just very deeply into meditation.)
“Yellow Submarine”:
Paul McCartney intended it to be a children’s song, and wrote a spoken introduction to go along with it, but the idea of the intro was abandoned—no recording of it exists.
“Because”:
The chord progression is Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” played backward. Lennon got the idea after hearing Yoko Ono play the original piece on the piano. The unique vocal is the result of Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison singing in unison, then overdubbing the parts twice to create nine-part harmony.
“Got to Get You Into My Life”:
In his autobiography,
Many Years From Now
, McCartney admitted who the song was about: nobody. It was actually about his need to smoke marijuana.
Granger, Iowa, has two water towers, labeled HOT and COLD.
“When I’m 64”:
Paul McCartney wrote this song when he was 15, then recorded it a decade later with the Beatles. It was about his hope that he would have someone to love him in his old age. In 2002 McCartney married former model Heather Mills. They split up in 2006...one month before McCartney’s 64th birthday.
“Twist and Shout”:
The Beatles’ first concert ever held in a stadium was their show at Shea Stadium in August 1965. The first song they played: “Twist and Shout.” The Beatles’ version came from a 1962 recording by the Isley Brothers, but the Isleys didn’t originate it: a Philadelphia R&B group called the Top Notes did.