Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (53 page)

The garfish (or needlefish) has green bones.

JUDGES GONE WILD

Further proof that being a judge is no guarantee that a person has good judgement
.

J
udge:
Sharon “Killer” Keller, the presiding judge on the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals. She is the highest-ranking criminal judge in the state.

Background:
On September 25, 2007, the United States Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that questioned the constitutionality of the method of lethal injection that Texas uses to execute condemned prisoners. By chance, an inmate named Michael Richard was scheduled to be executed in Texas that very night. Richard’s lawyers wanted to request a stay of execution based on the Supreme Court’s action, but they had computer problems and shortly before 5:00 p.m. they called the Court of Appeals and asked if it could remain open a few minutes past closing time so they could file their papers. Such requests are typically granted before scheduled executions...but not this time. “Tell them we close at five,” Judge Keller replied. The lawyers missed the deadline, and Richard was executed a few hours later.

What Happened:
Keller was brought before the State Commission on Judicial Conduct and charged with five counts of misconduct relating to the case. The commission could have removed her from the bench, but they let her off with a reprimand. Even so, Keller appealed the verdict to the State Supreme Court. She lost; at last report she was considering requesting a new trial. (Keller’s other claim to fame: authoring a 1997 opinion that denied a new trial to a man serving 99 years for aggravated rape after DNA tests
excluded
him as a suspect in the crime. “We can’t give new trials to everyone who establishes, after conviction, that they might be innocent,” Keller explained to an interviewer. The man was later pardoned by then-governor George W. Bush.)

Update:
In 2010 Keller was fined $100,000 by the Texas Ethics Commission for failing to list more than $2.8 million in assets on financial disclosure forms. (She’s appealing that, too.)

Multiply your weight by 7%. That’s how much your blood weighs.

NATURE’S REVENGE

What happens when you mess around with nature? Sometimes it works out...but sometimes nature gets even. Here are a few instances when people introduced new animals into the environment—and regretted it
.

I
mport:
Indian mongoose
Background:
Ecologists consider black rats, which came aboard ships with European explorers, to be one of the most destructive predators ever introduced to the New World. Columbus unintentionally left a few behind during a stopoff in Jamaica in 1494. By 1870, the rats were costing Jamaican plantation owners as much as one-fifth of their sugar cane crops. So in 1872, they decided to import the Indian mongoose to control the rats.

Nature’s Revenge:
They did eat the rats...but then they moved on to chickens, piglets, lambs, kittens, puppies, frogs, turtles, nesting birds, lizards, bananas, coconuts, sweet potatoes, pineapples—anything they could get their teeth into. In 1883 further importation was banned and a bounty was placed on the mongoose.

Imports:
Rats, cats, and rabbits

Background:
In 1810 seal hunters discovered Macquarie Island, about halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica. The rats that came aboard their ships jumped off, and that was the beginning of what scientists call an “ecosystem meltdown.” The sealers brought cats to the island to keep the rodents from eating their food stores. Then, around 1879, they brought European rabbits to breed and provide a ready food supply.

Nature’s Revenge:
By 1884 there were thousands of rabbits. The cats ate the rabbits, so the feline population exploded. But they also ate birds, and quickly rid the island of two native species, a rail and a parakeet. By 1985 conservationists decided they had to shoot the cats to prevent the loss of more bird species. But as the cat population declined (the last was killed in 2000), the rabbit population soared. At last count, some 130,000 rabbits were nibbling away at the island’s vegetation, turning lush slopes into bare earth. The rabbits have now stripped 40 percent of the island bare.

Only U.S. president buried in Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson.

Import:
European snails

Background:
In the 1870s, an aquatic snail native to Europe was introduced to the Great Lakes region. It wasn’t intentional: They probably came in the ballast of timber transport ships or stuck to packing crates.

Nature’s Revenge:
In the summer of 1898, when Chicago residents turned on faucets, the soybean-size snails came out along with the water. Millions of the snails clogged the filtering screens at Chicago’s waterworks, so many that they had to be shoveled into carriages and hauled away. But that didn’t end the infestation. The snails—dubbed “faucet snails” after the Chicago invasion—have now spread to infest municipal water supplies as far away as Montana to the west and Maryland to the east.

Import:
Russian hogs

Background:
In 1912 a shipment of 14 wild Russian hogs, including 11 sows and 3 boars, arrived at a private game preserve in western North Carolina. The owner’s intent: to breed them for sport hunting. By the early 1920s, the preserve had about 100 hogs, and the hunt was on. The hunters managed to kill only two hogs. Most of the rest escaped into the surrounding mountains.

Nature’s Revenge:
The hogs thrived and spread, including into the nearby Great Smoky Mountains National Park. They bred with local hogs, producing a hybrid that can weigh as much as 300 pounds and have tusks eight inches long. Though normally shy and reclusive, the hybrid hogs can be ferocious when confronted. According to one mountaineer, “Them tusks can rip a hound from stem to stern. What’s more, the hog knows it.”

Import:
American gray squirrel

Background:
In 1890 ten gray squirrels were shipped from the United States to England and released on the estate of the Duke of Bedford. Why? Just for the novelty.

Nature’s Revenge:
The grey squirrel moved into Britain’s parks, gardens, and woodlands. Rather than sticking to their usual diet of nuts, the American squirrels began to strip and eat bark, killing forests of beech, sycamore, and oak trees. Over the next 100 years, the species “colonized the entire land surface of England and Wales.” Current economic cost: more than $16 million a year.

If you lined up every
Harry Potter
book sold, they’d circle the Earth twice.

DEATH BY LAWNMOWER

We must be pretty cynical to think it could be even mildly amusing that any particular country has the highest per capita death rate due to, say, falls from trees. And yet somehow it’s kind of compelling, isn’t it?

E
mphysema and alcohol-related liver diseases:
Hungary

Falls down steps, blunt-object attacks:
Lithuania

Hepatitis, explosions:
Malta

Asthma:
South Korea

Meningitis:
Nicaragua

Cholera:
Belize

Kidney failure:
El Salvador

Stabbings, and overall murders:
Colombia

Anthrax:
Paraguay

Obesity:
Austria

The common cold:
Egypt

Heart failure:
Argentina

Executions:
The Bahamas

Chicken pox:
Venezuela

Teen suicides, skin cancer:
New Zealand

Cancer:
The Netherlands

Lightning strikes:
Cuba

Lawnmower accidents, falls from trees:
Moldova

Lupus, sickle-cell anemia:
Bahrain

Falls from cliffs:
Austria

Gun-related murders:
South Africa

Single-car crashes:
Lithuania

Eating disorders:
Iceland

Snake and lizard bites:
Panama

Epilepsy:
Estonia

Multiple sclerosis:
Norway

Schizophrenia:
Finland

Struck by falling objects:
Cayman Islands

Burning clothing:
Latvia

Circulatory diseases:
Ireland

Heart disease:
Slovakia

Background check: Some mummies are so well preserved that their fingerprints can be taken.

FABULOUS FLOPS

Some more stories to remind you that even though an idea might look good on paper, it doesn’t always pan out in real life
.

P
roduct:
The Dodge La Femme, introduced by Chrysler in 1955
What it Was:
One of the first American cars designed specifically with women in mind

Details:
In the mid-1950s, Chrysler executives noticed that a lot of one-car families were buying second cars, and that women had a big say in the purchase—after all, moms would be doing much of the driving of the new car. So why not make a car just for ladies? The 1955 La Femme featured a two-tone “Heather Rose and Sapphire White” paint job, rose-colored fabric seats with pink vinyl trim, and special seatback compartments that stored the La Femme rain cape, rain hat, umbrella, and shoulder bag, which was stuffed with a La Femme compact, cigarette lighter, cigarette case, and other accessories.

Flop:
Women in two-car families were going to do most of the driving in the second car, but not all of it. The pink-and-white La Femmes were like giant purses on wheels—few men of that era would have been caught dead driving one, and few ever were... only about 2,500 had sold by the time Chrysler discontinued the car for the 1957 model year. Only a handful of La Femmes survive today. They’re valuable collector’s items, and so are the accessories: In 1998 a La Femme shoulder bag and rain cape sold for $17,000...
without
the car.

Product:
The McDonald’s Arch Deluxe

What it Was:
A “hamburger for adults” introduced in 1996

Details:
The Arch Deluxe was marketed as a premium burger for customers who’d grown tired of Big Macs and Quarter Pounders. Its special features included a bakery-style bun made from potato flour, “Spanish” onions, “extra-fancy” ketchup, and its own “secret sauce”—mayonnaise mixed with two (
two!
) kinds of mustard.

First U.S. military unit to have African-American officers: the Confederate Louisiana Native Guards (1862).

Flop:
Company hype aside, the burger was just a stuck-up Quarter Pounder. The ad campaign supporting it didn’t help: TV commercials showed kids complaining that the Arch Deluxe was “yucky” (McDonald’s way of saying the burger was for people with “mature tastes”). Sticker shock made things even worse: The Arch Deluxe cost twice as much as a Big Mac, prompting many customers to give it a pass. McDonald’s predicted $1 billion in sales the first year, but sales were so bad that individual franchisees yanked it from their menus without waiting for corporate headquarters to kill it. McDonald’s spent as much as $300 million on the Arch Deluxe before it finally gave up, making it the most expensive flop in fast-food history.

Product:
Yesterday and Today

What it Was:
A Beatles album released in the U.S. and Canada in the summer of 1966

Details:
Despite the Beatles’ huge popularity, Capitol Records still insisted on reworking the Fab Four’s albums for American audiences.
Yesterday and Today
was just such an effort, a mishmash of tracks from the British versions of three different Beatle albums:
Help!, Rubber Soul
, and
Revolver
.

Flop:
For the album cover art, Capitol inexplicably selected a photograph of the Beatles in white butchers coats, holding bloody cuts of meat and nude, decapitated baby dolls in their hands and on their laps. Such a photo likely would not have attracted much notice buried in a book of art photographs, but on the cover of an album it was too provocative. Capitol somehow didn’t realize this until it printed up 750,000 copies of the album, then mailed advanced copies to music critics and radio stations. When even
disc jockeys
complained, Capitol knew it had a problem: It withdrew all 750,000 albums from circulation and pasted new, less offensive cover art (the Beatles gathered around an open steamer trunk) over the offending image. After the cost of pasting the new cover art on all those albums was factored in,
Yesterday and Today
actually
lost
money in its initial release, quite an achievement at the height of Beatlemania.

Flip-Flop:
In 2006 a rare, factory-sealed “Butcher Cover” version of
Yesterday and Today
sold at auction for $39,000.

AFTER THE FUNERAL

Sometimes the funeral isn’t the end it’s supposed to be—it’s just the beginning
.

A
LISTAIR COOKE (1908–2004)
Claim to Fame:
Host of the PBS series
Masterpiece Theater
from 1971 to 1992

After the Funeral:
After Cooke died from lung cancer in 2004, the 95-year-old was cremated according to his wishes, but not before modern-day medical “body snatchers” stole pieces of his leg bones and sold them for $7,000, for use as surgical bone grafts. Cooke wasn’t the only victim: The body snatching ring, run by an ex-dentist named Michael Mastromarino, worked with crooked funeral homes in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania to steal bones and other tissue from more than 1,000 cadavers, many of whom, like Cooke, were diseased, making them unsuitable for transplants. It’s estimated that the stolen tissue was implanted into about 10,000 unsuspecting patients, some of whom suffered ill effects as a result. After the ring was busted in 2005, Mastromarino and other conspirators pled guilty to abusing corpses, forgery, theft, and other charges and received long prison sentences. Mastromarino is serving 25 to 58 years.