Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (47 page)

MILEY CYRUS.
When Barbara Walters interviews celebrities for her Oscar-night specials, she films in the celebrity’s home to create a sense of warmth and intimacy. When she and her crew came to Cyrus’s home in 2008, they made themselves a little too much at home. They used her bathrooms...and clogged all the toilets. Cyrus had no hard feelings—she called a plumber and later sent Walters a tiny solid-gold toilet to commemorate the experience.

GERARD DEPARDIEU.
In 2011 the French actor was on a CityJet flight, on his way to Dublin to film a movie. The plane was delayed on the tarmac at the Paris airport. Nature called, and Depardieu got up to use the bathroom. Flight attendants told him he’d have to wait until the plane was in the air. Depardieu, who suffers from prostate problems, couldn’t wait—so he relieved himself on the carpet of the airplane, in the aisle, in front of other passengers.

JACKIE CHAN.
He’s a fervent environmentalist, and he takes that attitude with him to movie sets. Addressing a crowd at a “Green Living” rally in Singapore in 2009, Chan insisted that members of the film crew save water by going to the bathroom in groups. Only after the last one finishes up, he explained, can the toilet be flushed. Chan calls it the “Golden Flush.”

What’s Antarctica’s Pole of Inaccessibility? The point farthest inland from any ocean.

JUST PLANE WEIRD

If you happen to be reading this page on board an airplane, you might want to save it for when you’re back on the ground
.

I
NCIDENT OF NOTE
In January 2010, an Oregon man named Joseph Johnson boarded a flight to Hawaii, then got mad when he saw there was no seat in front of him to store his things under. Apparently he needed to vent his anger. Ninety minutes into the flight, he filled out a comment card and passed it to the fight attendant in a sealed envelope. “I hope we don’t crash and burn...or worse yet, end up on some place like Gilligan’s Island,” the note read. “What if the plane ripped apart in mid-flight and we plumited [sic] to earth?” Alarmed, the pilot radioed a distress call, and two fighter planes were scrambled to escort the plane back to Portland, where Johnson was arrested and charged with interfering with the duties of a crew member. “He told me he didn’t think anyone would open [the envelope] during the flight,” the investigator wrote in an affidavit. “He thought the card was going to be taken back to an office somewhere, opened, and everyone in the room would ‘get a laugh’ from it, and perhaps he’d even get some frequent flyer miles out of it.” Instead, Johnson got sentenced to 50 hours of community service and was ordered to write a letter of apology to the airline and his fellow passengers on board the flight.

SILENT TREATMENT

Not long after midnight on March 22, 2011, the pilot of an American Airlines flight from Miami to Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., radioed the control tower to request landing assistance. No response. After repeated attempts to reach the tower by radio and via a “shout line” that broadcasts through a loudspeaker in the control tower, the pilot went ahead and landed anyway, assisted by an air traffic controller in Warrenton, Virginia, 45 miles away. A few minutes later, a United Airlines flight from Chicago also landed without assistance from the tower. Finally, after 30 minutes of dead air, the lone controller on duty was suddenly back on the air, blaming a “stuck microphone” for the problem. He later admitted to falling asleep at his post and was suspended while the incident was investigated. This was the second time in two years that the National Airport control tower fell silent. The first incident occurred when another lone controller accidentally locked himself out of the building.

12 nations have trillion-dollar economies. So do 3 US states: California, Texas, and New York.

GROUNDED

In November 2009, police responded to a report of someone disrupting operations at Griffin-Spalding County Airport in Georgia. They discovered a Delta Airlines pilot named Dan Wayne Gryder driving his car back and forth across the runway. Gryder initially gave the police a fake name. Then, when they figured out who he was and attempted to issue him a citation, he quickly boarded his personal plane, a 1937 Douglas DC-3 airliner. After threatening the officers, he tried to take off, but then realized he was out of fuel. When police refused to let him refuel, he parked the plane and was arrested as he stepped onto the tarmac. At last report Gryder (who is also a private flight instructor) was suspended from Delta and awaiting trial for aggravated assault and obstruction of justice. One aviation industry blog’s headline: “Delta Pilot Accused of a Lot of Things.”

CLOTHES CALL

In June 2009, a U.S. Airways flight from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Los Angeles was disrupted when a passenger, 50-year-old Keith Wright of the Bronx, New York, stripped naked and refused to put his clothes back on. When a flight attendant tried to cover him with a blanket, he started punching and kicking, at which point two off-duty police officers on the flight subdued and handcuffed him. The plane was diverted to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Wright was taken off the plane. “He had some alcohol at the Charlotte airport and was on medication but didn’t take it. Perhaps a combination of not taking his medication, plus the alcohol and the altitude all impacted his usual behavior,” the Albuquerque airport police chief told reporters. (Wright, a former employee of the Transportation Security Administration, says he doesn’t remember the flight.)

On average, it takes 85 lbs. of feed to raise a 30-lb. turkey.

STRANGE SUPERSTITIONS

It’s hard to imagine that anyone could possibly believe these old superstitions, but then some people actually doubt the existence of the Great Flooplenocker, so go figure
.

• A newborn’s first sneeze is lucky. Before the sneeze, the baby is under the influence of bad fairies, and the newborn who does not sneeze may become a warlock or witch.

• Is she
really
a witch? Drive a nail into her footprint. If she returns to pull it out, she’s a witch.

• Dropping an umbrella on the floor means there will be a murder in the house.

• To remove a birthmark, rub it with a duck’s foot. (No word on whether it should be attached to the duck.)

• Don’t throw out hair trimmings. If a bird uses your hair for a nest, you’ll be prone to constant headaches.

• Your best chance of recovering from being struck by lightning is to be buried up to your neck in the ground.

• Carrying St. John’s wort keeps the devil from coming any closer than nine steps away from you.

• The pains of childbirth can be lessened by untying all knots in a house and unbraiding the woman’s hair.

• To cure a headache, rub your fingers under your arms really hard and then smell them.

• To be successful in all you do, carry a bat’s heart with you at all times.

• Break the shell of a boiled egg after eating it to keep witches from traveling in it.

• A girl who eats chicken gizzards will have big breasts.

• To avoid bad luck after seeing an ambulance, pinch your nose until you see a black or brown dog.

• A mole on the buttocks foretells death by hanging.

• Swallowing young frogs whole will cure cancer.

• If you leave the house wearing a fern, you’ll lose your way and snakes will follow you.

• Knives stay sharp longer once they have “tasted” their owner’s blood.

One industry seeing an increase in business since the 2008 recession, according to CNN: psychics.

NICE LEGS!

Some facts that really stand up
.

• All animals on Earth with legs are descended from animals without legs—the first creatures to leave water for land. Fossil evidence suggests this happened roughly 400 million years ago.

• All insect species (there are an estimated 6 to 10 million of them) have three pairs of legs. Although they can differ considerably, there are five main types of insect legs:

Cursorial
.
Specially adapted for running. Examples of insects with such legs are cockroaches and silverfish.

Saltatorial
.
Adapted for jumping. You’ve seen them on grasshoppers and crickets.

Raptorial
.
For grasping prey. Example: the praying mantis.

Natatorial
.
Flat and covered with fine hairs. They’re used for swimming, and are found on insects like diving beetles.

Fossorial
.
For digging. Found on burrowing insects such as mole crickets.

• The legs of crustaceans (crabs, shrimp, barnacles) and myriapods (centipedes, millipedes) all have seven segments.

• The more than 100,000 species of arachnids (spiders, scorpions, ticks, etc.) have four pairs of legs. Each leg is made up of seven segments. From the body out, they are
coxa
,
trochanter
,
femur
,
patella
,
tibia
,
metatarsus
, and
tarsus
.

• Most mammals have four legs, and most of them use all four for walking. The others—the aquatic mammals (such as whales and seals) and bats all
descended
from animals with four legs.

• A few, including humans, are
bipedal
, meaning we use two limbs to get around.

• Other bipeds: birds; macropods (hopping animals such as kangaroos); some lemurs that, when on the ground, hop sideways on two legs; the
Tyrannosaurus rex
(and many other extinct creatures).

• The fewest number of legs on any animal: two. The most: 750, recorded on
Illacme plenipes
, a type of millipede found only in central California. (The number of legs varies, but most members of the species have more than 600.)

Once they climb higher than 8,000 feet, many mountain climbers hallucinate.

• There are no known animals with an odd number of legs.

• Some insects, such as caterpillars, have structures called
prolegs
on their abdomens. In the case of caterpillars, the prolegs have tiny hooks on them and can be manipulated to assist the creatures in moving. But they are unsegmented and, as such, are not considered true legs.

• There are around 1,100 bat species in the world. They all have two legs, but only two—vampire bats and lesser short-tailed bats—can walk. The rest have legs that are too fragile and weak for walking.

• Why do birds stand on one leg? Scientists believe they do it to conserve heat. Birds’ legs contain significant veins and arteries, but aren’t covered with feathers, so they lose body heat through their legs. Standing on one leg simply reduces the rate at which they lose that heat. (Another theory about why birds stand on one leg: If they stood on no legs, they’d fall over.)

THERE’S AN APP FOR
THAT
?

UK Payphone:
If you’re traveling in the United Kingdom, this app will help you find the closest pay telephone...which seems kind of pointless, since you’d have to have your
phone
to use it.

Wooo! Button:
Tap the button and it shouts “wooo!”

Hair Clinic for Man and Woman:
The producers bill it as “the world’s first mobile hair clinic system.” They claim that if you run this $8.99 app while rubbing the phone on your head, it releases frequencies that promote the circulation of blood on the scalp, helping hair to grow.

SimStapler:
Press the picture of the stapler. It makes stapling sounds.

Hang Time:
It measures how high into the air you can throw your smartphone. The app costs 99 cents, but make sure to catch your phone, or it will end up costing a lot more.

Myth-understood: Elephants aren’t afraid of mice (but they are afraid of bees).

DUMB CROOKS

With crooks like these, we hardly need cops. Here’s proof that crime doesn’t pay
.

O
FF THE HOOK
In March 2011, Kevon Whitfield, 19, and a 14-year-old friend phoned Topper’s Pizza in Clifton, Ohio, and ordered a pizza. But what they really wanted to do was to rob the pizza delivery person. How do we know this? Because after Whitfield phoned in the order, he forgot to end the call—his cell phone was still connected to Topper’s Pizza as he and his accomplice were planning the robbery. A Topper’s Pizza employee heard everything and immediately called the cops. The police replaced the delivery driver with an undercover officer, who arrested the two prospective thieves as they tried to pull the heist.