Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (6 page)

• “One right New Balance shoe (never been worn). I broke my right foot and only used the left shoe, so now I have this new right shoe. Great gift for a one-footed person, or if you know anyone with a broken left foot.”

• “Giving away absolutely free of charge, with no lien, mortgage, or other encumbrance of any sort, the undisputed world-record holder in the ‘loudest vacuum cleaner on the face of the Earth’ category! Act now to take advantage of this truly unique opportunity!”

• “Left-handed vintage air guitar for free. All that’s needed is new strings and a good dusting.”

If September 1st falls on a Monday, December 1st will, too.

FOR SALE

• “Fart Jar for sale: My hot girlfriend’s fart in a mason jar. Need cash to pay the rent.”

• “I have some banana slugs. I will lease them out for $1 per day. You just come and catch them, and keep sliding dollar bills under my front door. I am trying to save up for a flat screen TV.”

• “I found four cockroaches in a box of Triscuits a few months back. I hate to have to get rid of them but I’m moving to a smaller place and won’t really have the room for them anymore. Re-homing fee of $15 each or $50 for all four.”

• “I have more than 1,300 pope hat replicas that I really need to get rid of. They are a little too small for most adult heads and are also irritating to the skin, so you would need to have long hair or wear a smaller hat underneath (just like the real pope). Dogs do not like to wear these pope hats, but maybe a large cat would wear one.”

HELP WANTED

• “Looking for an assistant to help in texting duties—replies, deleting texts, alerting of new texts, reading texts, filtering texts. I get 40–50 texts an hour. I can’t handle my workload plus texting responsibilities. My phone gets too full and needs to be deleted every couple of hours. This is a full-time position and you must be wherever I am, because my phone is always with me.”

• “We have a complete business plan that aims to yield investors 1,000% returns within only a five-year period. We have all the pieces in place; the only missing piece is YOU! We are looking for a very motivated scientist who has experience in teleportation research and/or technology. Send a resume and any other information that may set you apart from other teleportation scientists.”

• “I need someone to hide Easter eggs in my apartment when I am not there. They are small and filled with candy.”

Life is half spent before one knows what life is.

—
French proverb

Orthorexia
is an unhealthy obsession with eating healthy foods.

BOUNCING BABIES

Call it luck, call it divine intervention, or just chalk it up to the fact that infants and toddlers are a lot tougher than meets the eye. Here are some incredible stories of survival
.

B
ABY GOES ROUND AND ROUND
Three-month-old Ayden Robinson of Dunn, North Carolina, was unaware of the threat of the impending tornado, but his babysitter, Jonathan Robinson (also his cousin), was terrified. They were inside a mobile home, a notoriously unsafe place to be caught in a twister. But it was bearing down on them, and even though Robinson was holding onto Ayden as tight as he could, it wasn’t tight enough. “The wind just took him straight out of my arms,” said Robinson. After the storm passed, the trailer was in tatters. Robinson looked for Ayden but couldn’t find him. Then he heard the faint sound of crying. He followed the sound and found the baby, unharmed, lying on a pile of debris, almost as if he were carefully placed there. “He’s not supposed to be here now,” said his mother, “but he is!”

BABY NEEDS A NEW CRIB

“All of a sudden, the house just shook,” said Kenneth Enright, after a Toyota 4-Runner crashed into his Richmond, Kentucky, home in 2011. The truck had plowed into his 10-month-old daughter’s bedroom while she was taking a nap. “We ran in, and we didn’t see Aylinia,” said Enright. “All I saw was the vehicle actually
on top
of her crib!” Enright shimmied under the truck but still couldn’t see or hear any sign of his baby. But then, “She let out a cry, and there she was. She had her hands up, like, ‘Get me out of here!’” The driver of the SUV, who’d simply lost control, was “extremely apologetic.” Given that Aylinia was fine, the Enrights weren’t too concerned about the gaping hole in the side of their house.

BABY BOUNCES

A couple in Paris went for a walk one day in 2010 and left their two children—a three-year-old girl and an eighteen-month-old boy—alone in their 7th-floor apartment. (The parents were later charged with reckless endangerment.) Both kids climbed through an open window onto the balcony. People on the ground yelled at them to go inside, and the girl did, but the boy climbed through the railing...and fell from 80 feet up. Thankfully, Dr. Philippe Bensignor was positioned just right. The boy bounced off a restaurant awning and landed softly in the doctor’s arms. “He didn’t have a scratch,” said Bensignor. Making this truly lucky was that on just about any other day, the awning over the seating area would have been retracted, but because it was a bank holiday, the restaurant was closed and the awning was there.

First college to issue degrees: the University of Bologna, in 1088.

BABY GOES FOR A SWIM

When three-year-old Demetrius Jones’s grandmother awoke from her nap, the boy was missing. So was his battery-operated ride-on-top Chevy Silverado toy truck. After a frantic search, there seemed to be only one place the boy and the truck could have gone—into the Peace River next to the British Columbia campground where the family was staying. Family, neighbors, and Royal Canadian Mounted Police immediately started to hunt for Demetrius. “After three hours, we spotted what looked like some rocks or an eagle,” neighbor Don Loewen recalled. “The ‘rocks’ were the black tires of the overturned toy sticking out of the water. And what we thought was an eagle was the little boy’s blond head.” And he was alive. When they plucked Demetrius from the water,
eight miles
downriver, “He wasn’t even fazed,” said Loewen, “although he seemed pretty excited to be dealing with the police.”

BABY TAKES THE TRAIN

In 2009 just one day after Australian safety officials issued public service announcements warning parents at train stations to keep a close watch on their children, a mother at a Melbourne train station took her eye off her 15-month-old son’s baby carriage. Suddenly, a gust of wind blew the carriage forward; it rolled over the ledge, flipped over, and landed upside down on the tracks. The mother lunged for the child, but it was too late—the train came along a split second later, forcing her back. The train ran over the carriage and dragged it 30 feet before rolling to a stop. No one wanted to look underneath, but someone had to. To everyone’s amazement, the little boy was there, alive and okay. His only injury: a slight bump on the head.

June 21 is International Gnome Day.

BABY MAKES WAVES

Two Japanese parents had their worst fears realized when the March 2011 tsunami swept through their home and ripped their four-month-old daughter out of her mother’s arms. Mom and Dad survived but were told there was little hope for their baby girl. Two agonizing days passed with no word. Then, on the third day, a military search-and-rescue worker heard what sounded like a crying baby. He thought his ears were playing tricks on him; all they had found so far were corpses. But when he heard more cries, he yelled for his team. They began digging furiously, lifting away hundreds of pounds of rock, glass, and debris until they finally found the baby, still in her pink woolen bear suit—and there was hardly a scratch on her. No one knows how the girl didn’t drown or get crushed to death. Rescue workers called her a “tiny miracle.”

FANCY BATHS

•
Milk Bath.
Roman scholar Pliny the Elder’s
Natural History
(A.D. 77) notes that emperor Nero’s wife, Poppaea, traveled with a herd of lactating female donkeys so that she could bathe in their milk (with oils, lavender, and honey added in). Cleopatra was said to bathe regularly in milk, too. As it turns out, the ancients were on to something: The lactic acid in donkey milk contains
alpha hydroxy
, a known exfoliant that is believed to improve the skin’s appearance. Milk baths aren’t used much anymore, but hundreds of modern beauty and bath products contain alpha hydroxy acids.

•
Bubble Bath.
Products that made baths burst with soapy bubbles appeared on the market not long after soap flakes were invented by the Lever Brothers in 1899. In the 1950s, ads suggested that a bubble bath could soak bathers clean—with no scrubbing needed—so their popularity for children took off. Sold as either dry flakes or liquid, bubble bath isn’t much different from liquid soap, except for whatever scents are added in. All-time bestselling bubble bath: Mr. Bubble, sold in bright pink bottles since 1961.

The only place a naked mole rat has hair: inside its mouth.

FLUBBED HEADLINES

Whether silly, naughty, obvious, or just plain bizarre, they’re all real
.

Chick Accuses Some of Her Male Colleagues of Sexism

Westinghouse Gives Robot Rights to Firm

How to Combat That Feeling of Helplessness With Illegal Drugs

World’s Largest Stove Destroyed by Fire

Deaf College Opens Doors to Hearing

Young Marines Make Tasty Christmas Treats

Students cook & serve grandparents

Butts arrested in Boob murder case

Parents keep kids home to protest school closure

Hispanics ace Spanish tests

Self Help Network asks businesses for assistance

Most doctors agree that breathing regularly is good for you

Academics to dissect Bob Dylan at NY conference

EXPERTS: FEWER BLOWS TO HEAD WOULD REDUCE BRAIN DAMAGE

Tiger Woods plays with own balls, Nike says

Threat disrupts plan to meet about threats

Mayor Parris to homeless: Go home

Police seeking man handcuffed to chair

Doobie tickets on sale for Joint show

D
ENVER: A CITY FULL OF BRIANIACS
?

Dead man found in graveyard

Rangers’ Hamilton to get shot for sore knee

NASA’s original calculations predicted a 5% chance for a successful moon landing.

I SPY...AT
THE MOVIES

You probably remember the kids’ game “I Spy, With My Little Eye...” Filmmakers have been playing it for years. Here are some in-jokes and gags you can look for the next time you see these movies
.

T
HE HANGOVER
(2009)

I Spy...
a character from
Rain Man

Where to Find Her:
When the main characters approach a craps table, one of the women sitting there is played by Lucinda Jenney. She was reprising her role as the prostitute who tried to pick up Dustin Hoffman’s autistic character, Raymond Babbit, in 1988’s
Rain Man
. She was even wearing the same blue dress.

MAMMA MIA!
(2008)

I Spy...
two members of ABBA

Where to Find Them:
The Swedish pop stars have cameos in the hit movie musical based on their music. Benny Andersson shows up as a piano-playing fisherman during “Dancing Queen”; Björn Ulvaeus appears at the end dressed as a Greek god.

ON GOLDEN POND
(1981)