Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (38 page)

RAISIN WATCHER.
Workers at a British cake factory sit all day, watching raisins pass by on a conveyor belt. Their task? To ensure that no two raisins go by stuck together. When the raisins get to the end of the belt, they all fall into a single bin.

BODILY FLUID COLLECTION SQUEEZER.
(Warning: This is a little gross.) At the Royal Women’s Hospital in Victoria, Australia, microbiologists are studying the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases in large populations. The best collection medium they’ve found so far: used tampons. Turns out that women are statistically more apt to participate in such studies when they collect specimens themselves, rather than submitting to an invasive procedure done by a doctor. The biggest problem for the microbiologists comes at the extraction stage. Normally, a centrifuge would be used to extract fluids for testing, but tampons are designed to retain fluids. According to Dr. Suzanne Garland, “Optimal recovery requires manual squeezing.”

ANT HUNTER.
These people spend their days sticking straws into the tops of anthills and blowing into them until ants—5,000 to 50,000 at a time—swarm out. They capture the agitated insects in a tin scoop and then quickly transfer them to mason jars and move on to the next hill. Why do they hunt ants? Ant farms. Uncle Milton’s Ant Farms are popular science-based toys—more than 20 million farms have sold since 1956—but they don’t come with ants. Without water, ants can survive for only three days, so each farm includes a
certificate
for live ants. (You send in the certificate, and Uncle Milton sends you a vial of 20 to 30 ants that come from the ant hunter.) If you get an ant farm for Christmas, you might have to wait, though. When it’s too cold where the ants are headed, the shipment is delayed. “No sense in having a child disappointed by a vial of frozen ants,” says professional ant wrangler Afton Fawcett.

In a take-out container? Scientists have discovered 4,000-year-old noodles in China.

SUPER REPO MAN.
When the economy goes down, the super repo business picks up. “Super repo” men repossess items worth millions—747s from Sri Lankan airlines, speedboats from Wall Street titans, helicopters from failed flight schools, and so on. The pay is good, too. Firms such as Citibank, Transamerica, and Credit Suisse pay super repo men $600,000 to $900,000 per snatch. The catch: These deadbeats aren’t the typical ticked-off Toyota owners. They employ guards, police, even military units to protect their investments. Nick Popovich, president of Sage-Popovich, Inc., an Indiana airplane repossession company, has been in the business for 30 years. And during that time he’s been jailed and beaten in Haiti, threatened by Neo-Nazis with shotguns in South Carolina, and arrested by
gendarmes
in France. Popovich once flew out of the Congo with its president’s personal plane. “There’s still a death warrant out for me,” he told the Smithsonian’s
Air & Space
magazine.

AN INSTANT CONNECTION

In March 2011, Sara Kemp, 42, and George Bentley, 47, both from England, met in a London bar after chatting on an online dating site. They talked about their pasts...and quickly made a startling realization: They were brother and sister. They’d been separated as kids when their parents divorced, and hadn’t seen each other in 36 years. The reunited siblings got over their embarrassment, and now visit each other on a regular basis.

A mouse can fit through a hole the diameter of a ballpoint pen.

“WORDS ON A SHIRT”

And other real T-shirt slogans we’ve seen
.

JENIUS

Free Tibet*
*with purchase of another tibet of equal or greater value

I
Polygamy

Most Likely to Secede, Class of 1825

Fingers Are Overrated, Explosions Are Awesome

Medicine Is the Best Medicine

Maybe it’s the booze talking, but I want you to know I love booze

Practice safe lunch: use a condiment

THIS IS MY SKINNY-DIPPING SHIRT

I’m breaking the first rule of Fight Club

I make over four figures a year

SPORTS MANSHIP IS FOR LOSERS

You had me at ‘sup

Your favorite band sucks

Sorry about what happens later

Is it solipsistic in here, or is it just me?

Voted “most likely to travel back in time,” Class of 2057

Hedgehogs: Why don’t they just share the hedge?

Dear Math, I’m not a therapist. Solve your own problems.

Rock Is Dead and Paper Killed It!

If life gives you lemons, keep them. Because, hey, free lemons!

May the Mass x Acceleration Be With You

The only thing we have to

Men dream most frequently about roads; women dream most frequently of water.

ANCIENT SUB-URBS

What if there was an abandoned city underneath your house, waiting for you to discover it? Sound far-fetched? Read on
.

W
HERE’D THE FLOW GO?
In 1972 a Turkish farmer named Latif Acar was trying to figure out where the water disappeared to when he watered his crops. He could see that it wasn’t soaking into the soil...so where was it going? Baffled, Acar started digging, and before long, he discovered something unexpected—an underground room. Further excavation revealed a complete underground city with 10 subterranean levels, the lowest at a depth of 131 feet. It was large enough to house 60,000 people, and its 52 air shafts made it fully habitable. But the question remained: Who could have dug an entire city below ground? And why?

MEET THE CONE HEADS

Starting around 3,000 years ago with the Hittites and continuing into the Christian era, the people of Cappadocia, Turkey, needed more than just shelter. They needed a hiding place—somewhere they could go on short notice and not be found. Reason: The region lies at a strategic spot along ancient trade routes that linked China to the West, and threats came from all directions—the Assyrians, the Persians, Alexander the Great, the Romans, and warring Muslims, to name just a few. Luckily, Cappadocia has an unusual natural feature: towering cone-shaped formations called “fairy chimneys” that rise 50 to 300 feet in the air. Millions of years ago, volcanic eruptions deposited a layer of porous, sandy rock over the region. Over time, rain and wind turned the soft stone into a moonscape of towers, caves, clefts, and cloth-like folds, and the area’s earliest inhabitants carved dwellings into it. When invaders threatened, the Cappadocians dug deeper, ultimately creating a warren of underground chambers.

For hundreds of years, whenever hoof beats sounded on the rock, the locals ran down the steep staircases in the caverns, then rolled huge stone disks over the entryways and locked them in place. They had everything they needed to live comfortably for months: kitchens with
tandoor
fireplaces (cylindrical clay ovens), meeting rooms, wine cellars, salt-grinding tables, grain storage areas, Turkish baths, and toilets. They had arsenals filled with weapons, churches with elaborate painted frescoes, and multiple escape routes. Wells provided water, and ventilation shafts brought in fresh air. They even brought their animals along, keeping them safe in underground stables.

It’s called a “bug” for a reason: There’s a species of beetle whose Latin name is
Agra vation
.

Cappadocia’s hidden cities were in continuous use for 2,500 years up until the 14th century, when the region became part of the Ottoman Empire and villagers felt safe enough to stay aboveground. But for hundreds of years after that, those who knew about the subterranean cities kept them secret from outsiders.

DARTH INVADERS

Since its rediscovery, Cappadocia has captured the imagination of filmmakers and tourists with its eerie beauty. The region has been featured in 80 Japanese films and many Bollywood movies, it’s been in some European commercials, and it was used as a location for the Nicolas Cage movie
Ghost Rider II: Spirit of Vengeance
.

But despite the hoopla, small farmers like Latif Acar still tend crops, orchards, and vineyards in the region. They ride their donkeys home to their own houses carved into soft stone, and cope with the affluent Turks and foreigners who are now turning cones and caves into second homes, hotels, and B&Bs. And if they need to get away from the modern invasion, they can escape the same way their ancestors did. More than 200 underground cities like the one in Latif Acar’s field have been discovered over a 100-square-mile area (so far) and can be easily reached simply by ducking through one of the hundreds of doorways hidden in surface dwellings.

BACKYARD PROSPECTOR

Largest gold nugget ever found with a metal detector: “The Hand of Faith,” weighing 72 pounds, 11 ounces. It was found by Kevin Hillier of Wedderburn, Australia, outside his trailer. The Golden Nugget Casino in Las Vegas paid Hillier more than $1 million for the nugget, and keeps it on public display.

Besides the Olympics, ancient Greeks also held the Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmean Games.

DOES THIS
TASTE FUNNY?

Clever comedians and their culinary quips
.

“I was making pancakes the other day and a fly flew into the kitchen. And that’s when I realized that a spatula is a lot like a fly swatter. And a crushed fly is a lot like a blueberry. And a roommate is a lot like a fly eater.”

—
Demetri Martin

“I won’t eat snails. I prefer fast food.”

—
Strange de Jim

“Pie can’t compete with cake. Put candles in a cake, it’s a birthday cake. Put candles in a pie, and somebody’s drunk in the kitchen.”