Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (56 page)

COLORED FRANCIE

As early as 1967, Mattel wanted to reach out to (and sell toys to) African-American children. That year they produced a black friend for Barbie and called her Colored Francie. Advocacy groups quickly pointed out that all Mattel really did to create the doll was use the same head molds they’d used for the original, white Barbie, and dye the skin dark brown. It wasn’t until 2009 that
Mattel made a line of African-American Barbies (named Kara, Grace, and Trichelle) with unique designs that aimed to replicate the features of real African-American women.

Only Southeast Asian country that has never been colonized by a Western power: Thailand.

TOTALLY STYLIN' BARBIE

This 2009 Barbie doll came with a set of stickers that looked liked tattoos—hearts with the name “Ken” on them, for example. She also came with matching temporary tattoos for the girl playing with the doll, and packaging that encouraged girls to apply them to their lower back—a style of tattoo colloquially referred to as a “tramp stamp.” Parents and consumer groups, led by Consumer Focus, thought that sent two bad messages: that it’s okay for girls to do “trampy things,” and that it’s okay for kids to give each other homemade tattoos. Mattel did not agree, and Stylin’ Tattoo Barbie remained in the line.

TEEN TALK BARBIE

When dolls with voice chips inside them, such as Teddy Ruxpin and G.I. Joe, became big hits in the early 1990s, Mattel decided to give Barbie a voice too. Embedded in every 1992 Teen Talk Barbie was a computer chip that held four spoken phrases. The toymaker compiled and recorded 270 phrases, and gave each doll four at random. Examples: “I love shopping!” and “Let’s have a pizza party!” But a troublesome phrase ended up in approximately 1 percent of the dolls: “Math class is tough!” Many women’s groups, especially the American Association of University Women, felt it perpetuated the stereotype that women are bad at math and could make young girls think they would never be good at it. In response, Mattel offered to replace any math-averse Barbie at no charge. But their efforts came too late. When the controversy erupted, a satirical group called the Barbie Liberation Organization (B.L.O.) covertly bought hundreds of Teen Talk Barbies (regardless of whether they said “Math class is tough!” or not) and swapped the Barbie voice chips with chips taken from Talking Duke G.I. Joe action figures. The B.L.O. then put all the dolls back on store shelves, where they were purchased by some very confused children who ended up with G.I. Joes that exclaimed, “Let’s plan our dream wedding!” and Barbies that screamed, “Vengeance is mine!”

Most phobias cause blood pressure to rise.
Hemophobia
, the fear of blood, causes it to drop.

UNCLE JOHN’S
STALL OF FAME

Uncle John is amazed—and pleased—by the unusual ways people get involved with bathrooms, toilets, toilet paper, and so on. That’s why he created the “Stall of Fame
.”

H
onoree:
Florence Welch, who performs with backing musicians as Florence + the Machine
Notable Achievement:
Finding fame in a public restroom

True Story:
In 2006 Welch was an aspiring singer and recent art-school dropout. The closest she’d come to a performing career was singing, usually drunk, at open-mike nights in small clubs around London. One night, at just such a club, in just such a state of intoxication, Welch spotted Mairead Nash, the host of a BBC radio show that showcases new talent. Welch followed Nash into the restroom, introduced herself, and then sang the Etta James song “Something’s Got a Hold on Me,” right there in the bathroom. “I’d never heard anyone sing like that,” says Nash. She’d never managed a singer before either, but she agreed to manage Welch’s career. A recording contract soon followed, and in 2009 Welch’s first album,
Lungs
, debuted at #2 on the U.K. charts, second only to Michael Jackson, whose recent death had sent sales of his music soaring.
Lungs
bounced around the charts for 28 weeks, then hit #1, making it the bestselling debut album of 2009. “It’s such a funny fluke that I started, quite literally, in the toilet,” says Welch. (Her bestselling single in the U.S.: “Dog Days Are Over.”)

Honoree:
Dan Colen, 32, an artist living in New York

Notable Achievement:
Making a splash in the New York art scene by making a splash in an important bathroom

True Story:
Colen was an up-and-coming artist when he attended an exhibition opening in New York in 2006. Also there: Sam Orlofsky, director of the Gagosian Gallery, one of the most exclusive art galleries in the city. A newcomer like
Colen
should
have had a hard time getting a gallery like the Gagosian to show his work, but Orlofsky thought Colen had promise. “I suggested he do a show with us. He said, ‘Yeah, right, where am I going to show, in the bathrooms?’” Orlofsky told
The New York Times
. Actually, Orlofsky thought it sounded like a good idea, so he talked his boss, gallery owner Larry Gagosian, into hanging six of Colen’s paintings in the gallery bathrooms. They were priced at around $10,000 each, and they all sold immediately. (Colen had a second show at the Gagosian in 2010. This time they displayed his work in the main gallery, not in the bathrooms.)

In 2003 the South Pacific nation of Niue became the first country to have free, nationwide Wi-Fi.

Honoree:
Stephan Bischof, 24, of Honor Oak, England

Notable Achievement:
Retrofitting a wheeled trash can (a “wheelie bin,” as the British call them) to accept a more personal form of waste. Why? “I want to raise awareness of the fact that public toilets are closing,” Bischof says.

True Story:
If you’ve ever received the call of nature after a long night of pub crawling, you probably understand how the lack of available restrooms after closing time can lead to, shall we say, “outbursts” of antisocial behavior. That’s why Bischof converted his wheelie bin into a portable outdoor urinal—and an environmentally friendly one at that. The plastic pissoir “has a funnel on one side and liquid flows into a base, separate from the bin. The urine is mixed with dry grass to turn it into a bio-fertilizer,” reports London’s
Evening Standard
newspaper.

Update:
Bischof is on the hunt for investors. If he finds them, someday his wheelie urinals may appear outside of pubs all over Britain. (So is that a good thing?)

Honoree:
Laszlo and Andrea Csrefko, a married couple living in Bekasmegyer, Hungary

Notable Achievement:
Receiving an unusual visitor in their brand-new bathroom...and living to tell the tale

True Story:
We’ve all read news accounts of people seeing the face of Jesus on a piece of French toast. Andrea Csrefko had a similar experience, but she didn’t see Jesus. Not long after Laszlo finished installing a new shower, tub, and ceramic tiles in their
bathroom in 2010, Andrea took the first shower. It ended in horror when she saw the face of Satan in one of the tiles on the wall. “I was naked and coming out of the shower and I could suddenly see his eyes staring into me! I just screamed and ran,” she told the
Sun
newspaper. (“It wasn’t there when we put the tiles up. It just appeared overnight,” says Laszlo.) Repeated attempts to scrub Beelzebub off the bathroom wall have failed; ordinary household cleansers are apparently no match for Satan’s power. Neither is the Csrefko’s bathroom heater: “The room is always ice cold no matter how high we turn the heat,” Laszlo says. “We’ve stopped using the bathroom. It’s too spooky. We wash in the sink downstairs now.”

Food for thought: Human breast milk contains more lactose than cow’s milk.

Update:
The Csrefkos have called in a professional exorcist to drive Lucifer from their lavatory, with no luck so far: “We need help from God or from the spirit world or we’re going to seal up the room forever,” Laszlo says.

Honoree:
Koji Suzuki, bestselling Japanese horror writer and author of the novels
Ring
and
Dark Water
, both of which were made into Hollywood motion pictures

Notable Achievement:
Rolling out one of his horror stories

” printed on rolls of toilet paper. The terrifying tale of a goblin who lives in a public restroom, “Drop” plays on traditional Japanese superstitions about evil spirits who hide in toilets. (Did your folks ever tell you about the Boogie Man? In Japan it’s customary for parents to warn naughty children that a hairy hand will rise up out of the toilet bowl and drag them down into the abyss it if they continue to misbehave.) “Drop” is printed on the toilet paper in blue ink interspersed by red, blood-like splatters. The story takes up only three feet of toilet paper and is meant to be read in a single sitting. Priced at 210 yen (about $2.00), each roll contains several copies of the story so that more than one person gets to read it. “I’ve read the story and it’s very scary,” says Takaki Hayashi, vice president of Hayashi Paper, which markets the rolls as “Japan’s scariest toilet paper” and “a horror experience in the toilet.”
True Story:
In 2009 Suzuki partnered with the Hayashi Paper Corporation to have his short story “Drop

Most shark species have been around longer than trees have.

THE GARBAGE SATELLITE

They don’t have used clothing stores in space, so what’s an astronaut to do when his spacesuit wears out? Here’s the story of the spacesuit that talked back after it was thrown over the side
.

T
HE WELL-DRESSED ASTRONAUT
If you’re like Uncle John, you like to wear your old jeans, T-shirts, and sweatshirts until they’re tattered and riddled with holes. You can get away with that on Earth, but not in space: The spacesuits that NASA astronauts and Russian cosmonauts use can’t be worn until they’re full of holes, because their
not
having holes is what keeps the astronauts alive. Millions of dollars are spent designing and building the suits used on the International Space Station, yet most are used only a dozen times before they need to be completely refurbished or retired from service.

Then what? During the space shuttle era, NASA spacesuits could be returned to Earth aboard the shuttle and overhauled; now they’re discarded the same way that the Russian
Orlan
spacesuits are: via the unmanned
Progress
spacecraft that resupply the ISS three or four times a year. After supplies are unloaded from the
Progress
capsule, it’s stuffed with space garbage from the ISS: empty food containers, dirty clothes (the ISS doesn’t have a washing machine), old spacesuits, and other refuse. Then the capsule is set adrift in orbit, where it will eventually burn up as it re-enters Earth’s atmosphere. That shooting star you saw the other night? It might have been a flaming ISS garbage can.

TALKING TRASH

On more than one occasion, astronauts have used the spacesuits themselves as trash cans, cramming them full of garbage, hauling them out the airlock, and shoving them off the back of the ISS into space. In 2004 a Russian research team led by engineer Sergei Samburov took the concept a little further: Since
anything
tossed out of the ISS will orbit the Earth for a few months until it reenters the atmosphere, they decided to turn an old
Orlan
spacesuit into a cheap communications satellite by outfitting it with a microprocessor and an amateur (“ham”) radio walkie-talkie.

According to
The Joy of Cooking
, one ostrich egg will serve 24 people.

ARISS-TED DEVELOPMENT

Samburov and his colleagues were members of the Russian chapter of Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS). The group was responsible for getting a ham radio station installed on the ISS. Members train astronauts to use the station before they leave Earth, and then arrange for space-to-Earth contacts with school assemblies, science museums, scouting organizations, and other community groups on the ground. It’s all done with the purpose of encouraging people—especially young people—to take an interest in science, engineering, and mathematics.

Working out the details of what the spacesuit satellite would do fell to the Russian and American sections of ARISS. (The Russians nicknamed it “Ivan Ivanov,” the Americans called it “Mr. Smith,” but its official name was “SuitSat-1.”) Here’s what they decided:

• After identifying itself and giving its call sign (“This is SuitSat-1, RS0RS”), the satellite would play one of five different prerecorded greetings made by students from Russia, the United States, France, Japan, and Germany.

• This would be followed either by a digital voice stating the satellite’s temperature, battery power, and elapsed mission time, or by the transmission of a single digital photograph (stored in the microprocessor) that could be downloaded onto any computer.

• Then SuitSat-1 would pause for 30 seconds and begin transmitting again. The transmissions would repeat continuously, cycling through the five recorded greetings until the batteries finally died.

• Each greeting contained a “secret” word that students were encouraged to translate into their own language by exchanging information with students from other parts of the world.

• The subject of the digital photograph was also secret; to find out what it was, the photograph had to be downloaded.

Any student who succeeded in receiving the SuitSat-1 transmissions was eligible to receive a commemorative certificate, with special recognition going to students who translated the secret words or downloaded the digital image. SuitSat-1 broadcast its signal over a ham radio frequency, 145.990 MHz. And because the signal would be coming from directly overhead, the transmission
would be strong enough to give anyone with even the simplest police scanner or walkie-talkie tunable to ham radio frequencies a good chance of receiving the signal. The only trick was figuring out when SuitSat-1 was passing overhead, but that information was easy to get online.