Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (32 page)

—
Carl Sagan

“Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.”

—
John Dewey

“The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”

—
Neil deGrasse Tyson

“The greatest discoveries of science have always been those that forced us to rethink our beliefs about the universe and our place in it.”

—
Robert L. Park

“Only those who see the invisible can do the impossible.”

—
Bernard Lown

A 2007 earthquake lifted up the entire island of Ranogga, in the Solomon Islands, by 10 feet.

FAMOUS AND BROKE...

Just because you’re known by millions or you’ve changed history doesn’t mean you’re going to have any money in the bank
.

G
EORGE McGOVERN
retired from politics in the 1980s, after 18 years in the U.S. Senate and an unsuccessful run for president. In 1988 he bought and began operating a 150-room hotel in Connecticut. In 1991, just three years after it opened, the inn closed and McGovern filed for bankruptcy. He said that the cost of meeting governmental regulations and dealing with frivolous lawsuits drained him and the hotel financially.

BERNHARD GOETZ
shot four men in the New York City subway in 1984, claiming they’d threatened him with a screwdriver and tried to rob him. He was acquitted for that, but served 250 days in jail for carrying an unlicensed handgun. One of the muggers, Darrell Cabey, filed a civil suit against Goetz for the shooting, which left Cabey paralyzed. Cabey won a $43 million judgment. Goetz filed for bankruptcy in 1996, listing Cabey and his own lawyers as his primary creditors.

JAMES W. MARSHALL
was a New Jersey carpenter who moved to California in the 1840s, hoping to find a better life. There, while working at Sutter’s Mill (he was a partner in the sawmill), he discovered the gold that started the California Gold Rush. Lots of people got rich, but Marshall didn’t. Not only that, the sawmill went out of business because all his employees left to hunt for gold. Marshall was penniless when he died in 1885.

ELIOT NESS
won fame as the 27-year-old government agent who put gangster Al Capone in prison in 1931 on tax evasion charges. After that, things soured for Ness: His wife left him, he started drinking, he started a couple of failed businesses, and he got fired from a job at an alarm company for drinking too much. A 1947 run for mayor of Cleveland was his attempt to straighten things out—not only did he lose, but it left him with six figures of campaign debt. Bankrupt, Ness died of a heart attack in 1957.

Dinosaur ants, the world’s oldest known ant species, can grow to over an inch long.

FOUR NICE STORIES

Every now and then, we like to lock our inner cynics in a box and share stories with happy endings
.

T
OGETHER AGAIN
It was 1921. In a one-room schoolhouse in rural Wisconsin, two third-graders became “sweethearts.” But after the school year ended, Mac McKitrick and Lorraine Beatty lost contact with each other...for 85 years. Then, in 2009, they were reunited through family members (their brothers had become friends). The two lovebirds instantly remembered each other and picked up right where they left off: McKitrick proposed, Beatty said yes, and the newlyweds moved in with each other at an Illinois retirement home. “I still picture Lorraine as my third-grade sweetheart,” said McKitrick. “I’ve carried that in the back of my mind for all those years.”

JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS

An 84-year-old retiree named Don Ritchie has saved 160 lives over the past 50 years. How? By convincing people not to kill themselves. Ritchie doesn’t work at a suicide hotline, though; he lives across the road from a seaside cliff in Sydney, Australia, called “The Gap”—one of the country’s most notorious spots for suicides. Every day, Ritchie keeps an eye on the ledge from his living room window. If he sees someone who appears to be in despair, he walks over and starts talking to them. Ritchie’s approach is low-key: He smiles and asks the person if they’d like to come over for tea. Then Ritchie tells them they still have a chance to reconsider their decision. A few haven’t taken his advice, but most have. (Ritchie’s job before he retired: selling life insurance.)

In Peru, it is considered lucky to wear yellow underwear on New Year’s Day.

A BONDING EXPERIENCE

In December 2010, Mike Rodgers, an employee at Blue Grass Recycling in Burlington, Kentucky, was sifting through the contents of a bin that hadn’t been emptied for several months. Near the bottom, he found 23 U.S. savings bonds with face values ranging from $50 to $500. Rodgers did some research online and discovered that the bonds, purchased in 1971, were now worth $22,000. Rodgers could have tried to cash them in himself, but instead decided to try and find the owner...which turned out to be very difficult. He found the identity of the woman who had purchased the bonds, Martha Dobbins, but she had been dead for nearly 20 years. Rodgers then began looking for the other person named on the bonds: Robert Roberts. To his dismay, he discovered there were hundreds of “Robert Roberts” in the United States. But he figured that only one would know who Martha Dobbins was, so he started e-mailing and calling every Robert Roberts he could find. He met with dead end after dead end. Finally, after more than a week of searching, Rodgers found his Robert Roberts a few days before Christmas. Roberts, 82, lived in Florida; Dobbins was his mother. “I had taken care of her for several years before she died,” Rodgers explained, “but she never said anything about any bonds.” When Roberts received the bonds in the mail, he tried to give Rodgers a reward, but Rodgers refused, saying he did it because “it was the right thing to do.”

DINNER FOR TWO

One night in March 2008, Julio Diaz exited the subway at his stop in the Bronx, New York. When the 31-year-old social worker reached the stairs, a man held a knife to his back and demanded his wallet. Diaz slowly turned around, and noticed that his mugger was only a teenager. He took out his wallet and gave it to him. As the teen was walking away, Diaz, on a whim, decided to offer his coat. “If you’re going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you’ll want to keep warm.”

“Why are you doing this?” the teen asked.

“If you’re willing to risk your freedom for a few dollars, then I guess you must really need the money.” The teen accepted Diaz’s coat. Then Diaz invited him to join him at his favorite restaurant. The teen accepted. Once there, the two just talked for a while as they ate dinner. When the check arrived, Diaz explained that he didn’t have any money, but if the teen gave him his wallet back, then he’d treat him. The teen gave the wallet back. As he stood up to leave, Diaz asked for one more thing—the knife. The teen handed that to him as well and then left the restaurant.

Hair relaxer: At any given time, 15% of your hair follicles are resting.

THE UN-FRIENDLY SKIES

At one time, you had to do something bad to get in trouble with airport security
.

R
EAD ’EM AND WEEP.
In 2010 A Pomona College senior considering a career as a U.S. diplomat in the Middle East stuck his Arabic-language flashcards in a pocket before heading through airport security. He planned to brush up on his vocabulary during a flight from Philadelphia to California. Instead, he spent four hours in a holding cell, two of them in handcuffs. Plenty of time to consider whether the cards for “bomb” and “terrorism”—though highly relevant to his chosen field—should have been left at home.

NO YOLK!
In 2011 a TSA agent handcuffed and detained 35-year-old Valerie Baul at the Philadelphia airport. The offense? She cracked a plastic egg over an agent’s head after he asked what it contained. At the time, Baul was wearing a fuzzy pink bunny costume and carrying a basket filled with eggs that had already passed through the X-ray machine. (The eggs contained confetti.)

MOUSETRAP.
Israeli scientists have begun testing a new kind of body scanner. It looks like a traditional airport scanner, but hidden inside are three trays filled with mice, specially trained to sniff out bomb-making chemicals. If the mice smell chemicals, they escape into a side chamber and trigger an alarm. In a test run, mice successfully detected all 22 chemical-tainted mock-terrorists planted among 1,000 shoppers in a Tel Aviv shopping center.

BIG MOUTH.
In 2005 Dr. Esha Khoshnu, a New Jersey psychiatrist, was flying out of Phoenix on her way to San Diego. TSA tagged her for a random bag inspection. That’s when, according to airport staff, she got “mouthy and snippy.” Khoshnu said, “Even if I had a bomb, you wouldn’t find it.” That was enough—TSA detained her. She missed her flight, but was released. For some reason, however, Khoshnu’s luggage—the bag that needed to be searched because the TSA thought it might contain a bomb—was still loaded onto the San Diego-bound plane. Once the plane reached San Diego, Khoshnu’s bag was blown up on the tarmac.

Snowflake rule of thumb: The colder the air, the smaller the flake.

ACTION FIGURE FACTS

Uncle John would like to remind you, once and for all, he is
not
playing with his “dolls.” They are
action figures.

G
OODBYE, DOLLY
In 1964 designers at Hasbro Toys came up with a line of military dolls. Executives loved it, but the marketing department felt that boys would never buy anything called a “doll,” a term associated with girls’ toys. So they coined the term “action figure” to describe any human-like posable doll that was marketed to boys. And that toy line—G.I. Joe—was the first successful “action figure.” Here are some more action figure facts.

•
The Name Game:
“Action figure” is more than a marketing term—it’s also been used as a legal distinction. In 2003 manufacturer Toy Biz, which made Marvel, TNA Wrestling, and
Lord of the Rings
action figures, argued before the U.S. Court of International Trade that its products were toys, and not dolls. Why? Because companies have to pay higher tariffs on importing dolls produced in other countries—toys are subject to half the rate. Toy Biz lawyers argued that dolls are representations of humans, whereas action figures depicted “nonhuman creatures” (like super-heroes) or characters (like wrestlers) Toy Biz won the case.

•
Rarest Action Figure:
When
The Simpsons
went on the air in 1990, a hurricane of Simpsons merchandise flooded the market. Surprisingly, Simpsons action figures were poor sellers. How poor? A Bart Simpson doll wearing a shirt that says “Save Blinky” (the three-eyed fish who lives in the contaminated lake by the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant) was available only by mail via Mattel Toys. Anybody could send away for it, but only three people did. Those are the only three known to exist; they’re each worth about $1,000.

The Castilian, Burgundian, Mexican, Confederate, and US flags have all flown over Arizona.

•
The Birth of (He-)Man:
Mattel passed on the opportunity to produce toys based on the
Star Wars
films. Big mistake: The movie went on to generate more than $1 billion in action figure sales well into the 1980s. Mattel wouldn’t make a toy line based on the 1982 hit movie
Conan the Barbarian
, either, because it was R-rated. Instead, it created a new line of toys, combining the space fantasy of
Star Wars
and the beefcake and sorcery of
Conan
, and called it He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Toys and comic books sold well, but they didn’t take off until a TV cartoon series aired in 1983—specifically designed to boost sales of the toys (a children’s-programming practice later made illegal by the FCC). It was the bestselling toy line of the 1980s.

•
Movies to Toys:
Other toy companies didn’t seem to mind an R rating. R-rated movies with kids’ action figure lines include
Rambo, Toxic Crusaders, Terminator 2, RoboCop
, and
Aliens
.

•
Toys to Movies:
A group of businessman and artists formed a company called Toy Vault in 1998 to fill what it thought was an overlooked market: toys based on children’s literature. They bought the action figure rights for
Alice in Wonderland
and
Lord of the Rings
, and although no
Alice in Wonderland
figures were ever produced, the
Lord of the Rings
figures (Gandalf and Balrog) sold so well that executives at New Line Cinema decided that there was a market for big-budget
Lord of the Rings
movies.

•
Most-Hyped Figure That Ever Existed:
In late 1985, Mattel held a contest in which kids could send in their ideas for a new He-Man action figure. The best entry would be mass-produced and sold by the company. The winner: 12-year-old Nathan Bitner from Naperville, Illinois. His idea: Fearless Photog, a good-guy monster whose head is a video camera that drains the evil out of bad guys. Bitner won a $100,000 college scholarship, but the action figure was never produced. (Mattel did send him a picture of a prototype, though.)

•
Most Valuable Action Figure:
In the first wave of
Star Wars
toys—which didn’t hit the market until 1978, a year after the film’s release because Kenner didn’t anticipate the huge demand—a Darth Vader action figure came with a telescoping lightsaber. (The saber’s handle ejected from his hollow arm, and then a thinner piece came out.) It was very difficult to make and it broke easily, both in the factory and at home, so only the first wave had this feature, later replaced with a single-piece version. Only a few hundred were made and sold. Average value today: $6,000.