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

NO INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE

Like many Americans in the early 1900s, Georgia representative Seaborn Roddenberry felt very strongly about racial integration—he was the leading Congressional advocate for segregation. After African-American boxer Jack Johnson married a white woman in 1912, a public scandal, Roddenberry introduced the Anti-Miscegenation Amendment, which would have made interracial marriage a federal crime.

NO PRESIDENTIAL TERM LIMITS

Franklin Roosevelt was elected to four presidential terms—the Constitution set no limit on the number of terms a president could serve. Prior to that, all presidents had retired after two, a tradition started by George Washington. But Roosevelt and his sweeping program of social welfare were so hated by his Republican opposition that after he died in 1945 and Republicans gained control of Congress in 1947, they passed the 22nd Amendment, limiting the president to two terms. Since 1989, a repeal of that amendment has been proposed several times by members of Congress from both parties, as a way to continue the administrations of popular presidents.

It’s rare, but it is possible to get goose bumps on your face.

NO AUTOMATIC CITIZENSHIP

It’s set forth in the early pages of the Constitution that anyone born within the borders of the United States is automatically a United States citizen—even if they are the child of illegal immigrants. In 2003 Florida Congressman Mark Foley proposed an amendment to the Constitution that would remove that stipulation. It died in committee. (Foley’s career died after he was accused of having sent sexually explicit instant messages to Congressional pages.)

FEWER RESTRICTIONS TO THE PRESIDENCY

The Constitution forbids foreign-born U.S. citizens from becoming president. This was to prevent anyone from the British empire from ever seizing control of the United States. In 2003 Utah Senator Orrin Hatch proposed the Equal Opportunity to Govern Amendment, which would have allowed any naturalized (foreign-born) American who’d been a legal citizen of the United States for at least 20 years to be president. It was widely seen as a way to eliminate roadblocks for California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (who was born in Austria) in case he ever wanted to run for the country’s highest office.

NO FLAG BURNING

The Flag Desecration Amendment has popped up for votes frequently since 1968. It would give Congress authority to make it illegal to burn the American flag, an act currently protected as free speech under the First Amendment. Between 1995 and 2005, six different versions of the amendment were passed by the House of Representatives, but it couldn’t clear the Senate. In June 2006, the Senate voted 66–34 in favor of it...just one vote short of the two-thirds majority it needed to go on to ratification by the states.

Earth orbits the sun at a speed of about 1,000 miles per minute.

THE BIG CHALLENGE

Staging public “challenges” as a way to get relatively inexpensive advertising for your product is an old marketing technique. But now that we’ve entered the Internet age, some of those challenges have gotten pretty interesting
.

P
WN2OWN
Background:
Every year since 1999, online security experts in Canada have hosted a conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, called CanSecWest. In 2007 they decided to add a little excitement.

The Big Challenge:
Organizers offered a $10,000 prize to the first person who could remotely hack their way into an “unhackable” MacBook Pro laptop computer. They called the challenge Pwn2Own (“pwn” is Internet jargon for “to dominate.”) The winner would get the hacked computer (worth $2,000), as well as the cash prize.

Result:
On day two of the conference, hacker Shane Macaulay sent the computer an e-mail containing a website address. Per contest rules, the CanSecWest organizer using the MacBook had to open the e-mail and go to the website. It appeared to be blank—but it had been created by Macaulay’s friend and fellow hacker Dino Dai Zovi, and it contained
malware
, a malicious program designed by Dai Zovi to infect a Mac through its Internet browser. Moments later, Macaulay had complete access to all the data on the MacBook—and the contest was over. Macaulay got the laptop; Zovi got the $10,000. (Pwn2Own has been a part of CanSecWest every year since then. Prize money for the 2011 event: $125,000.)

VANISH!

Background:
Evan Ratliff is a writer for the technology magazine
Wired
, and in 2009 he wrote about how easy it is to locate people in the digital age. Credit cards, cell phones, and Internet use make it surprisingly simple to find out exactly where a person is, in ways that just weren’t possible in the past. The story inspired Ratliff to try to disappear, for just one month.

Dream on: Studies show that only 8% of dreams are about sex.

The Big Challenge:
On August 15,
Wired
announced the “Vanish!” challenge. Ratliff was traveling around the country, they said, and whoever could find him—and snap a photo of him—would win $5,000. (They also had to say the codeword “fluke” to Ratliff to get him to admit who he was.) Every day,
Wired
put clues to Ratliff’s whereabouts on their website, including information on his credit card use and IP addresses for computers he used.

Result:
Thousands of people took the challenge. One, Jeff Reifman, founder of an online technology company, used the clues to find an anonymous account Ratliff had opened on Twitter, and by reading Ratliff’s comments made an educated guess that he was headed to a book reading in New Orleans—not far from a pizza place called Naked Pizza. Reifman called Naked Pizza, and owner Jeff Leach agreed to help. On September 5, Leach went to the bookstore—and waited. Sure enough, he spotted Ratliff. Leach walked up to him, said, “You wouldn’t happen to know a guy named Fluke, would you?” and then snapped a picture of him. Ratliff was caught, and the contest was over. Reifman and Leach shared the $5,000 prize.

LIVE OFF GROUPON

Background:
Groupon, short for “group coupon,” is an online company that offers daily deals to its subscribers around the world. Here’s how it works: Groupon will negotiate a deal with a company, say, a wine shop in Buffalo, New York, to make one of their items half-off. If enough of Groupon’s subscribers sign up to buy a coupon for the deal, it takes effect. Groupon then splits whatever money it takes in with the store. (If not enough people sign up, the deal is simply off.) Groupon deals cover a huge variety of items, including food, clothing, electronics, even dance lessons, and they have been an enormous success: They reportedly turned down a $6 billion offer to be bought by Google in 2010.

The Big Challenge:
In 2010 Groupon founder and CEO Andrew Mason came up with the idea of offering a prize to anyone who could travel the country for one year living off Groupon coupons—but no cash, checks, or credit cards whatsoever. (The coupons could be used for what they were intended, or they could be traded for other things.) That February they held a contest in which people had to create a YouTube video explaining why they deserved to be the one to try the challenge. In May 27-year-old Josh Stevens of Chicago was declared the winner. Prize: If he could make it to May 2011 living only on Groupon coupons, he’d win $100,000.

A single drop of blood contains approximately 250 million cells.

Result:
Stevens made it. Over the year, he traveled to 50 cities, including New York, Minneapolis, Denver, Detroit, San Francisco—he even flew to London. He rode stock cars in Virginia, took singing lessons in Nashville, took a cooking class in Las Vegas, rode in a hot-air balloon in Kentucky, went sea kayaking in California, and a lot more—and never spent a cent of “real” money. He did it all on Groupon coupons. And at the end of the year, he was handed a check for $100,000. (When asked on the
Today
show why he did it, Stevens answered, “Why not?”)

WEIRD NEWS

• Brookfield, Connecticut, high-school teacher Robert Wollkind was placed on administrative leave in 2010 after making what was deemed an insulting comment to a student who had failed to bring his homework to class. In front of the entire class, Wollkind asked the student, who was overweight, if he had eaten it. Wollkind, 68 and in his 32nd year of teaching, retired soon after.

• In May 2010, an off-duty Ryanair pilot named James Sweetnam crashed his sportscar into a brick wall while driving in the English countryside. He refused to submit to a blood-alcohol test until three hours after the crash, at which point he still tested over the legal limit and was arrested for drunk driving. Because this was his second conviction, Sweetnam got a 12-month jail sentence (suspended) and was banned from driving until 2014. Banned from
driving
, but apparently not from
flying
: “He has since left Ryanair and is expecting to soon take a co-pilot’s job with Emirates Airline,” the
Leicester Mercury
newspaper reported in 2011.

Gnome recognition: German potter Philip Griebel invented garden gnomes in the mid-1800s.

UNEXPECTED
ENCOUNTERS

The photo of Elvis Presley’s 1970 meeting with President Richard Nixon is the National Archives’ most-requested item—it’s more popular than the U.S. Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Here are some more odd encounters
.

A
NNIE OAKLEY MEETS KAISER WILHELM
In 1889 famed American sharpshooter Oakley was touring Europe with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. That November, the revue stopped in Berlin for a sold-out performance at the city’s Charlottenburg Race Course. As part of her act, Oakley would tell the crowd that she was going to attempt to shoot the ashes off of a lit cigar. She’d then joke, “Who will volunteer to hold the cigar?” The line always got a laugh, but rarely a volunteer. (Oakley’s husband, Frank Butler, would then step up to the task.) On that day, however, the audience was aghast when Germany’s emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, stood up to offer his services. The brash Wilhelm, who’d been on the throne barely a year, waved away the police who tried to stop him, then took a cigar from a gold case in his pocket, and lit it. Oakley’s pride apparently outweighed the consequences of accidentally blowing off the head of a head of state. She paced off 10 large steps, drew her Colt .45 from its holster, and took aim. And then, much to the delight (and relief) of the audience, Oakley shot the ashes from the young monarch’s cigar. (It’s been speculated that, had she missed the cigar and hit the Kaiser instead, she might have prevented World War I.)

JANIS JOPLIN MEETS WILLIAM BENNETT

In early 1967, two decades before he was America’s first drug czar and the architect of Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign, Bennett was a graduate student studying philosophy at the University of Texas. He was also an active Vietnam War protestor and the guitarist in a local band called Plato and the Guardians. Janis Joplin was an up-and-coming blues rock singer from Port Arthur, Texas, who was singing in clubs around Austin, home of the University of Texas. Mutual friends thought the two would hit it off and set them up on a blind date. After spending a couple of hours eating barbecue and staring up at the big Texas sky, Joplin and Bennett found they did have a lot in common—an affinity for rock ‘n’ roll, an opposition to America’s involvement in Vietnam War, and the same taste in beer. What they didn’t have was romantic chemistry. “Let me put it this way,” Bennett said years later, “we were both disappointed.” Later that year Joplin hit it big with her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and became one of rock’s biggest stars. A hard-partying lifestyle and heroin addiction led to her death by drug overdose in 1970, at age 27. Bennett became increasingly conservative. Following his stint in the Reagan administration, he penned
The Book of Virtues
and several other books that advocated for self-discipline and family values.

The wetter to wee you with? Cuttlefish eyes have W-shaped pupils.

NIKOLA TESLA MEETS MARK TWAIN

Growing up in in the 1860s in what is now Croatia, Tesla was a sickly child prone to all manner of unidentified illness. Doctors had given up on him. One day while Tesla was bedridden, someone gave the sick boy an anthology of Mark Twain’s short stories. Tesla later said that it was “so captivating as to make me utterly forget my hopeless state” and credited the writer with what was considered a miraculous recovery. Tesla went on to pioneer electrical engineering and lay the groundwork for modern-day electricity, including alternating current (AC). In 1888 the two men met for the first time. Tesla told Twain how his stories had saved him as a child and “was amazed to see the great man of laughter burst into tears.” They became friends and Twain—an enthusiastic supporter of science—often spent time with Tesla in his New York laboratory.