Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (58 page)

“The Carrie Bradshaw of Canada”:
Josey Vogels writes three sex and relationship columns syndicated to Canadian newspapers: “My Messy Bedroom,” “Dating Girl,” and “The J Spot.” She’s advertised as Canada’s Carrie Bradshaw, after the sex-columnist character on the HBO series
Sex and the City
. But Bradshaw is based on real-life American sex columnist Candace Bushnell, so Vogels should probably be called “the Candace Bushnell of Canada.”

The music on
Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood
was written by his brother-in-law, Johnny Costa.

“The Bing Crosby of Canada”:
Montreal-born Dick Todd was a 1930s–40s crooner who sang in the style of Bing Crosby. He was one of the biggest Canadian music stars of the era, although his biggest hit was “Pennsylvania Turnpike, I Love You So.”

“The Bohemian Grove of Canada”:
The Bohemian Club is a group of powerful international political and economic leaders who meet annually for a retreat at a camp in northern California called the Bohemian Grove. (Many conspiracy theorists believe the group is an insidious secret society). The Club now meets in Canada too, in the Toronto suburb of King City, at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce Leadership Center.

“The Bermuda Triangle of Canada”:
Over the past few decades, police have been baffled by mysterious deaths, unsolved disappearances, and the sudden appearances of headless corpses in the South Nahanni River valley in the Northwest Territories, leading some people to give the area this nickname.

“The MIT and Harvard of Canada”:
As the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the United States’ most exclusive and prestigious technical and scientific training school, the University of Waterloo is Canada’s. In the U.S., Harvard is one of the nation’s oldest and best universities. In Canada, that honor goes to McGill University, founded in Montreal in 1821.

“The Birmingham of Canada”:
Entrepreneur Hiram Walker founded Walkerville, Ontario, in 1858 as a planned community: He established a whiskey distillery and built up the farming and factories necessary to manufacture the beverage. And it worked. By the turn of the century, the home of Canadian Club whiskey had become one of Canada’s biggest industrial and farming centers, mirroring Birmingham, England. (Walkerville is now part of the city of Windsor.)

“
The Wire
of Canada”:
The Wire
was a cerebral—and critically acclaimed—HBO series from 2002 to 2008. It detailed the intricate dynamics of newspapers, politicians, and drug dealers in Baltimore. The Canadian Broadcasting Company’s
Intelligence
took a similar approach to the underbelly of Vancouver. Some critics called it “
The Wire
of Canada,” but that didn’t bring in many viewers. It was canceled in 2008, after only 25 episodes.

The actors who played zombies in
Night of the Living Dead
(1968) were paid $1 and a T-shirt.

KNOW YOUR BOATS

See if you can match these fictional skippers’ names to their fictional ships and the stories they came from. (Answers on
page 539
.)

World’s largest jack-o’-lantern: 17 feet in circumference, carved from a 1,469-lb. pumpkin.

MACGYVER ESCAPES!

On
the
’80s TV show, MacGyver (played by Richard Dean Anderson) was a secret agent who never used a gun—he used whatever he found lying around to create weapons and tools to get out of whatever dangerous predicament he happened to find himself in. MacGyver’s innovations may seem improbable, but the show’s writers were careful to use sound scientific principles as the basis for the “MacGyverism.” Besides—it made for fun TV. Here are a few examples of how MacGyver did what he did
.

T
RAPPED IN A TOILET-BOWL FACTORY...
...MacGyver breaks open a gas line and places a rubber glove over the leak. While it inflates with noxious gas, he hangs an electric lightbulb (on a cord) over the glove. When the villain threatens to shoot him, MacGyver throws chunks of a broken toilet bowl at the bulb. On his second try, he hits the bulb. Sparks fly and ignite the gas-filled glove. It explodes. MacGyver escapes!

TRAPPED IN A BOOBY-TRAPPED MANSION...

...MacGyver fastens the head and shoulders of a suit of armor to the top shelf of a wheeled kitchen cart. He then uses a rubber band to attach an electric mixer to the cart’s front wheel and plugs it in. The mixer turns the wheel, which propels the cart across the floor and out of the kitchen, triggering automatic motion-detecting guns. The cart takes the hit. MacGyver escapes!

TRAPPED IN A LIQUOR-STORE WAREHOUSE...

...MacGyver removes a length of heating duct and straps it to a wooden crate. Into the duct he places a small, sealed keg of beer. Behind that he places a garbage can full of wood, douses it with an available flammable substance—whiskey—and lights a fire with some matches he conveniently finds lying around. The flames heat the keg, which ignites the alcohol inside, propelling the keg through the pipe, breaking a door open. MacGyver escapes!

TRAPPED IN A DIFFERENT WAREHOUSE...

...MacGyver has been tied up by bad guys, and has just four minutes before a time bomb is set to explode. Just then, a very friendly
dog wanders into the warehouse. Somehow, MacGyver gets the dog to fetch a bottle of sulfuric acid that just happens to be sitting on a nearby table. He then convinces the dog to place the bottle on one end of a seesaw contraption that MacGyver made out of a yardstick and an empty bottle that he was able to reach with his feet. MacGyver slams his feet down on the makeshift catapult, which launches the bottle of acid into his hands, which he uses to dissolve the ropes binding his hands and feet. MacGyver (and the dog) escape!

Aloha, good lookin’! The hula was originally performed as a fertility rite.

TRAPPED IN A CRASHED PLANE...

...and buried under an avalanche somewhere in Russia, MacGyver wraps the plane’s emergency oxygen tank in a piece of fabric that he tears off a sleeping bag. He then puts the bundle in a bucket of vodka, buries the bucket in the snow just outside the plane’s door, and lights the fabric on fire. The vodka and the oxygen tank combust and blow a hole out of the snow. MacGyver escapes!

TRAPPED ON A TRAIN...

...MacGyver has to figure out who on board sold tainted medicine to a tribe of Middle Eastern nomads before the train stops and they can escape. So he runs a wire from the cuff of a blood-pressure monitor into a mechanical, wind-up alarm clock. When somebody wears the cuff, and they lie, their pulse quickens and the alarm clock goes off. MacGyver nails the bad guy with it. The bad guy doesn’t escape!

TRAPPED ON A CRUISE SHIP FULL OF SOULS...

...is the premise of a 1990 episode. MacGyver gets into an accident, falls into a coma, and dreams he meets up with his deceased grandfather. The two get trapped by Anubis, the Egyptian god who is the keeper of the afterlife, in the engine room of a cruise ship full of souls. Anubis has jammed an axe in the ship’s lock wheel as an extra precaution. Fortunately, even when he’s dreaming, MacGyver can get out of any sticky situation. He wraps one end of a fire hose around his side of the lock wheel, and the other around the propeller shaft of the ship. As the propellor turns, tension builds from the hose, eventually snapping the door’s lock and the axe handle. MacGyver escapes!

Only U.S. president who did not represent any political party: George Washington.

STRANGE LAWSUITS

We’re back with a BRI favorite: unusual legal battles
.

T
HE PLAINTIFF:
A Polish hunter named Waldemar
THE DEFENDANT:
Jaworski Jagdreisen, a German travel agency that specializes in African hunting expeditions

THE LAWSUIT:
Waldemar
really
wanted to shoot an elephant, so in 2010 he booked a vacation with Jaworski Jagdreisen, which sent him to a game reserve in Zimbabwe (one of the few countries where it’s still legal to hunt elephants). Waldemar was told that if he found an elephant’s excrement, he could pick up the animal’s trail and shoot it. But he found neither excrement nor elephants, and went home empty-handed. After he complained, the agency gave him a free trip back to Zimbabwe, and this time, he shot and killed an elephant. Nevertheless, Waldemar sued the travel agency for $130,000 for failing to provide him with an elephant to kill on the first trip.

THE VERDICT:
Case dismissed. The judge remarked, “The fact that elephants were not encountered during the hunt does not testify that elephants were not there.”

THE PLAINTIFFS:
David Jonathan Winkelman and his stepson, Richard Goddard

THE DEFENDANT:
KORB, an Indiana hard-rock radio station

THE LAWSUIT:
In 2000 DJ Ben Stone announced on the air that any listener who had the station’s call letters tattooed on their forehead would receive $150,000. Winkelman and Goddard decided to take them up on the offer. But first they went to the station and asked if the deal was legitimate. They were told it was, so they went to a tattoo parlor and got their foreheads inked with the station’s slogan: “93 Rock, the Quad City Rocker.” When the two men went to the station to claim their prize, Stone photographed them and then informed them it was just a practical joke. Winkelman and Goddard received no money, but their pictures were displayed on the station’s website. Winkelman lost his job, and neither man could find work because of the big tattoos on their foreheads. Winkelman and Goddard sued, claiming that the
radio station set out to “publicly scorn and ridicule them for their greed and lack of common good sense.”