Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (23 page)

Lichens are actually two living creatures in one: a green plant and a fungus.

Found in the bathroom:
$182,000 in Depression-era currency

What it was doing there:
Being stored for safekeeping.

Story:
Finding treasures in the bathroom doesn’t always work out well. Take the case of contractor Bob Kitts and his former classmate, Amanda Reece. In 2006 Reece hired Kitts to remodel a bathroom in her 83-year-old house near Cleveland, Ohio. While Kitts was ripping out the old walls, he discovered two lockboxes filled with envelopes of cash—$135,000 in one, $22,000 in the other—hidden behind the medicine cabinet. Two days later, he found a cardboard box with $25,000 in the wall behind the bathtub. He immediately called Reece and after a giddy interval of unwrapping and counting bills, things quickly soured between the two. She offered to Kitts 10 percent of the money; he wanted 40 percent. She refused, so he went to a lawyer, who told him that the law favored him. Then things got worse. The story was picked up by the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
, and descendants of Patrick Dunne, the man who had owned the house until his death, saw it. They noted that the envelopes were labeled “The P. Dunne News Agency” and sued Reece for the money. Too late: By the time the case got to court, the money had dwindled dramatically. Reece testified that she’d spent around $25,000 on herself and $14,000 on a trip to Hawaii with her mother, sold $54,600 of the rare bills to a coin dealer, and lost $60,000. (She claimed it was stolen from her closet.) What was left? $25,230. The court ruled that 86.3% of it should go to Patrick Dunne’s 21 heirs and the rest should go to Kitts. In the aftermath, Reece lost the home in foreclosure and filed for bankruptcy. And Kitts, who had to split his share of the money with his lawyer, ended up with only $2,700 and complained that he’d lost business because he had been portrayed as a greedy “bad guy” in news reports.

Wrap artists: It took ancient Egyptian embalmers 15 days to wrap a mummy.

ROBOTS IN THE NEWS

Robots are getting smarter and more advanced every day. Familiarize yourself with these recent developments, puny human
.

C
ASHIER-BOT
Since the 1980s, UPC codes and cash register scanners have automated most of the checkout process. So why not replace the cashier with a robot? In 2011 a Stanford University team unveiled PR2 (for “Personal Robot 2”), a robot that can scan and bag groceries. It uses a high-speed articulated hand to pick up and rotate each item until it finds and carefully scans the barcode. A computer then looks up the pricing data and the PR2 tosses the item into a sack. (The Stanford team is still working on the robot’s bagging skills.)

BABBLE-BOT

In May 2011, Scientists at the University of Queensland in Australia gave robots one of the tools they need to become sentient: They taught them how to develop their own language, independent of what they are programmed to know by humans. The “lingo-droids” wander around a room and make up words for things, then relay that information to other lingodroids. Choosing from a set of programmed syllables, such as “ku,” “rey,” “za,” and “la,” a robot that finds itself in an unfamiliar area will pick an unused syllable combination, then point to the place and say the word to the other robots. Then the information is reinforced with games. For example, one robot will say “ku-zo,” then two other robots will race to where they think “ku-zo” is. At that point, all three robots have learned a new word they made up themselves.

DISMEM-BOT

If giving robots the ability to speak without humans knowing what they’re talking about sounds scary, it’s nothing compared to the robot that’s outfitted with so many motors and sharp knives that it can completely debone a chicken in 2.5 seconds. The Japanese-built Mayekawa Automatic Chicken Deboner butchers 1,500 birds in an hour and costs $560,000. (It’s for commercial processing plants, not home cooks.) Another feature: It accounts for variations from chicken to chicken—in milliseconds. It photo-scans each one, then processes the data and adjust its blades slightly to realign the depth and location of each cut. Then it grabs hold of the chicken’s wings and rips the meat off of the rib cage.

Q: How many first ladies have visited
Sesame Street
? A: Four (so far)—Barbara Bush, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, and Michelle Obama.

BUM-BOT

British artist Tim Pryde designed a robot that solicits donations for charity. It’s name: DON-8r. (Get it?) A waist-high, white, pod-shaped droid that resembles EVE from
Wall-E
, DON-8r detects when humans are nearby, and then calls out to them in a traditionally mechanical “robot” voice to ask for money. If the human obliges and inserts a few coins into DON-8r’s donation slot, it leaves them alone and retreats...a few feet, then returns to ask for more.

NURSE-BOT

For the past decade or so, robots have played an increasing role in healthcare, be it robotic cameras that explore inside the human body or robotic arms that assist in surgery. But what about nursing? Researchers at Georgia Tech were curious to know whether people are ready for a robot to do the job that’s usually done by a nurturing human. So they did a study. A nurse-robot named Cody would touch a human subject on the arm. Intent seemed to matter most: If told Cody was
cleaning
their arm, the test subjects reacted favorably. If told Cody was attempting to comfort them, the subjects responded negatively.

PIRATE-BOT

After the wave of pirate attacks off the coast of Africa, an American company called Recon Robotics is developing a remote-controlled robot that can help rescue trapped ships and hostages. About the size of a soda can, the ship-boarding bot is fired from a distance (out of a cannon) and attaches itself to the enemy ship’s hull with magnetic wheels. Then it “walks” up and over the side of the ship. Once on board, it sends video images back to the controller. Recon is working in cooperation with the U.S. Navy. They want to keep the anti-pirate robot out of the private sector so it doesn’t fall into the hands of the wrong people...specifically, real pirates who would use it to raid other ships.

EDIFICE COMPLEX

Think the old woman who lived in a shoe had weird taste in housing? It turns out she was just ahead of her time. Buildings can look like all sorts of things. Even..
.

A
N IGLOO
Crouched on the Parks Highway about 180 miles outside of Anchorage, Alaska, is a hulking four-story igloo. Its dome can be spotted from an airplane flying at 30,000 feet. Built in the 1970s, the igloo was meant to give tourists a chance to visit a “real” Alaskan igloo. Igloo City, as it’s known, has been a convenience store, a gas station, a makeshift triage clinic for a man attacked by a grizzly bear, and an emergency airplane refueling stop (a small plane once landed on the highway and taxied in for gas). But other than part of the ground floor, the igloo itself has never been used. It was supposed to be a motel, but the couple who built it forgot something important: building codes. The structure never passed inspection, and its owners went broke.

...THE WORLD’S LARGEST CHEST

In the 1920s, the High Point, North Carolina, Chamber of Commerce built its first building-sized chest of drawers. Twenty feet tall, the giant chest served as the chamber’s Bureau of Information and helped to promote the city’s image as the “Furniture Capital of the World.” In 1996 the chest was augmented, making it 38 feet tall. In 2010, upset with the city’s refusal to help with the upkeep of the landmark, Pam Stern, the building’s owner, had the chest measured for a giant bra: 20 feet of silk, spandex, and underwiring. (Get it? A
chest
of drawers.) HanesBrands Inc., maker of Playtex bras, sent engineers over to take the chest’s measurements. Whether the city will permit the chest to wear the bra remains unknown at this time.

...A CHICKEN

A 56-foot-tall chicken head juts from the roof of the Kentucky Fried Chicken at the corner of Roswell Street and Cobb Parkway in Marietta, Georgia. Locals use it as a landmark when giving directions: “Turn right, after you pass the Big Chicken.” The architectural whimsy, built in 1963, was a Johnny Reb’s Chick, Chuck and Shakes fried-chicken restaurant until 1966, when the owner, Tubby Davis, sold it to his brother, who turned it into a KFC. In 1993 the chicken suffered wind damage and might have been demolished were it not considered too important to be axed. Reason: Pilots use the building as a reference point when approaching Atlanta and nearby Dobbins Air Reserve Base.

What were Chewco, Obi-1 Holdings, and Kenobe? The names of Enron subsidiaries.

...A NAUTILUS SHELL

In 2006 a young family in Mexico City decided to ditch their conventional home and build one more in harmony with nature. From above, their new house looks like the perfect spiral of a nautilus shell. From the front lawn, it looks like a soft-serve ice cream sundae. The frame for the building consists of steel-reinforced chicken wire that’s covered in a two-inch layer of stucco, inside and out. Stained-glass bubbles in the walls sparkle like sunlight on water. A stone walkway spirals from room to room on a bed of live plants, creating the sensation of floating above the ocean floor. The bathroom’s sandy walls and blue tiles offer users the illusion of being underwater. Family memebers say the Nautilus House makes them feel “like a mollusk in its shell, moving from one chamber to another.”

..
.MR. ROBOTO

In 1986 Thai architect Sumet Jumsai designed the new Bank of Asia in Bangkok to reflect the computerization of banking going on at the time. Result: The $10 million, 20-story building looks like a giant LEGO robot. The “robot” has two antennae that serve as lightning rods, and glass eyes with louvered metallic lids that serve as windows. Jumsai wanted the building to “free the spirit from the present architectural intellectual impasse and propel it forward into the next century.” The inspiration for what has been called a post-high-tech marvel? His son’s toy robot.

If you’re average, you’ll spend 25 years of your life working and 2 years socializing.

...AN EGG

The owner of a European ad agency wanted to add an office next to her lakeside house in Belgium, and hired the design firm dmvA to come up with something organic-looking that could be built without cutting down a single tree. Local authorities refused to issue a building permit because city council members thought the design was too weird: The building—nicknamed “the blob”—looked like a giant white egg. To get around the council, the designer turned the egg into a mobile unit so it would qualify as a work of art, not a building. The structure consists of a wooden frame with a polyester skin and an ultra-modern grid of niches molded into the interior for storage. The interior features lighting, a sleeping shelf, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The pointy end of the egg (the egg is on its side) opens up to create a porch. After the project, known as the Blob VB3, was completed, the unique structure appeared in a Belgian newspaper under the heading “Art skirts building regulations.” The next day, someone at the building council showed up to warn the owner that if the egg was placed near the house, there would be consequences. Dubbed the “rovin’ ovum” by its fans, the Blob VB3 went on the auction block in 2010. (No word as to whether anyone had the huevos to buy it.)

...A HOUSE ON STILTS

Architect Terunobu Fujimori has a weird way of getting approval for his unique designs. He invites clients to join him in his tiny
Takasugi-an
—his “Too-High Teahouse.” Perched 20 feet in the air, the 30-square-foot private teahouse in Chino, Japan, balances on two forked tree trunks that resemble spindly chicken legs. Once clients have climbed the ladders to the house, he shows them his hand-drawn plans. “If they don’t like my design, I shake the building!” he says with a laugh.

...A PEACH

The 150-foot-tall water tower outside Gaffney, South Carolina, was built to catch the eye of motorists speeding along I-85. It looks like a gigantic peach. In 1981, when the tower went up, the local economy depended on peach orchards. Townspeople wanted it known that Cherokee County, where Gaffney is located, grew more peaches per year than the whole state of Georgia (the “Peach State”). Macro-artist Peter Freudenberg studied local peaches for many hours and used 50 gallons of paint in 20 different colors to make the peach hyper-realistic. Features include a 7-ton, 60-foot-long leaf, and an enormous vertical cleft in its backside, leading to the nickname “Moon Over Gaffney.”

Flying aces: Some species of mosquito are such skilled fliers that they can dodge raindrops.

FAILED AMENDMENTS

It’s very difficult to amend the U.S. Constitution. A potential amendment has to pass both houses of Congress with two-thirds approval, and then it has to be approved by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states. Since 1787, only 27 amendments have been adopted. Numerous others have been proposed...and rejected. Here are some notable rejects
.

N
O FUNDS FOR CHURCHES
In 1875 President Ulysses S. Grant gave a speech endorsing the use of federal funds to establish public schools nationwide. Maine congressman James Blaine agreed with Grant, but not because he supported public education. He was against parochial schools—Catholic schools (and anything Catholic) in particular. This came on the tail of a large influx of immigrants from Ireland and Italy, two predominantly Catholic countries, and anti-Catholic sentiment in the U.S. was high. That same year, Blaine introduced a constitutional ban on the use of public funds for religious-based organizations. While that may sound like part of the debate over the separation of church and state, Blaine’s real goal was to prevent the Catholic Church from getting any tax money. (Ironically, Blaine actively sought the Catholic vote in his 1884 run for President of the United States, which he lost.)