Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (61 page)

Don’t believe it? Count ’em: A 2-lb. bag of sugar contains about 5 million individual grains.

UNDERWEAR
IN THE NEWS

Let’s face it: For those of us who don’t go “commando,” underwear is a pretty important part of life. So it’s understandable that it would make headlines once in a while
.

B
LUSHING BRIDE
In 2008 a New York woman named Sara Bostwick hired the Christian Oth Studio to photograph her wedding. Like a lot of brides, Bostwick wanted pictures of herself getting ready for the big day, but she made it clear that she didn’t want any pictures taken of her in her underwear. When Bostwick logged on to the studio’s website to look at proofs of her pictures, she was stunned to see that the photographer had ignored her request and had indeed taken pictures of her in her underwear. The pictures were on a password-protected part of the site, but Bostwick had already given out the password to wedding guests. She filed a lawsuit against the studio, claiming “severe emotional injuries, including post-traumatic stress disorder.” What happened? Bostwick lost—the judge ruled that while she may have been embarrassed by friends and family seeing her in her underwear, the pain she experienced did not constitute “emotional distress.” Bostwick plans to appeal the ruling; a spokesperson for the Christian Oth Studio retorted that Bostwick should have looked at the photos before giving out her password.

A ROYAL PAIN

England’s Queen Elizabeth II isn’t the kind of person who has to pack her own suitcases or do her laundry when travelling abroad, but there may be times when she wishes she was. In December 2010, a Florida auction house announced that it was auctioning a pair of lace undies that were left aboard an aircraft used by the Queen when she visited Chile in 1968. The garment, monogrammed with an ‘E’ and a crown, somehow fell into the hands of a Hungarian playboy named Baron Joseph de Bicske Dobronyi, who kept them for more than 40 years. When he died in the summer
of 2010, his heirs made plans to put the royal undies up for auction. At last report those plans were on hold, because “out of respect and courtesy for a person of such dignity and rank” as the queen, the British auctioneer wanted to wait a respectable interval after the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton before putting the royal knickers on the block. The opening bid is expected to be about $9,000, the same price that a pair of Queen Victoria’s bloomers fetched at auction in 2008.

How’d Jack Singer of Warwick, NY, celebrate his 10th birthday in 2010? By putting on 215 pairs of underpants, a new world record. “I feel the most excited in my life,” he said.

HAMBURGLAR

When some cash went missing from a McDonald’s restaurant in Midwest City, Oklahoma, in the summer of 2010, the manager took a look at the surveillance camera footage to see if it could shed some light on what happened. The video showed a woman wearing a white Spanx stretch girdle over her face; she walked up to the unattended drive-thru window, reached in, took the money from the cash drawer, and walked off again. After the footage was shown on the local news, an anonymous tip led police to 51-year-old Sharon Lain, a former night manager at the restaurant. She admitted stealing the money to pay a water bill. “Fortunately,” said Police Chief Brandon Clabes, “Ms. Lain’s crime spree was very brief. No pun intended.”

I’VE GOT A SECRET

In 2009 Koichi Wakata became the first Japanese astronaut to live on the International Space Station. Although few people knew it, he was making history of another kind as well: He went an entire month without changing his underwear, the longest voluntary stretch of underpants-wearing in the history of human spaceflight. Luckily for everyone else on the space station, these were no ordinary underpants. They were water-absorbing, antibacterial, odor-eliminating, quick-drying, flame-resistant, anti-static experimental “J-Wear,” developed by JAXA, the Japanese space agency. They were designed to be worn by astronauts for weeks on end without causing discomfort to the wearer (or to others in the vicinity), and Wakata was assigned to put them through their paces. “I haven’t talked about this underwear to my crew members,” he admitted shortly before returning to Earth. “I wore them for about a month, and my crew members never complained, so I think the experiment
went fine.” (When 33 Chilean miners became trapped underground for 69 days after a 2010 mine accident, JAXA sent each of them five pairs of the underwear.)

ON THE LINE

In December 2010, a Japanese woman (unidentified in press reports) sued Google for 600,000 yen ($7,433), alleging “psychological distress” after the search-engine giant posted a picture of her underwear on Google Maps. She wasn’t wearing it at the time—the underwear was hanging on a clothesline outside her apartment when the Google camera car drove by, snapping pictures for the company’s Street View service. The woman found the picture while looking online for a view of her apartment. “I could understand if it was just a picture of the outside of the apartment, but showing a picture of underwear hanging outside is absolutely wrong,” she told the court.

PANTY RAID

In the summer of 2010, the village of Portswood in southern England experienced a rash of underwear thefts. The heists occurred in a neighborhood popular with college students, and the thief showed a marked preference for young women’s and children’s underwear. Was a pervert on the loose? Were women and children in danger? Only if they were allergic to cats: The panty thief turned out to be Oscar, a stray cat taken in by Peter and Birgitt Weismantel, who volunteer as feline “foster parents” for a local cat charity. Oscar apparently liked his new foster home so much that he began stealing items from nearby homes and presenting them to the Weismantels as thank-you gifts. His 10-thefts-a-day habit was bad enough when he stole socks, garden gloves, and other random items, but when his focus narrowed to panties and children’s underwear, the Weismantels notified police to allay any fears in the neighborhood that the culprit was human. And who says crime doesn’t pay? Oscar’s larceny has earned him a permanent spot in the Weismantel’s home. “We can’t give him back now. He makes such an effort with these gifts,” Birgitt Weismantel told the
Southern Daily Echo
. “It’s just so touching to see him come home every day with something for us.” (At last report Oscar was still stealing away.)

First football player on a Wheaties box: Walter Payton of the Chicago Bears, in 1986.

I SPY...AT
THE MOVIES

More fun in-jokes and cameos from the silver screen
.

C
HARLIE’S ANGELS
(2000)
I Spy...
E.T.’s living room
Where to Find It:
Wearing nothing but a plastic blow-up

swimming-pool toy, Dylan (Drew Barrymore) bursts into a house where two boys are playing a video game. It’s the same house in Tujunga, California, that was used for
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
, the film that launched Barrymore’s career in 1982. (To hammer the point home, the kids are eating Reese’s Pieces and there’s an
E.T
. poster on the wall.)

HALLOWEEN H20: 20 YEARS LATER
(1998)

I Spy...
several nods to
Psycho

Where to Find Them:
John Carpenter cast Jamie Lee Curtis in the original
Halloween
(1978) in part because she is Janet Leigh’s daughter. Leigh, of course, appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 thriller
Psycho
. In this sixth sequel to
Halloween
, Carpenter cast Curtis along with Leigh herself, who plays Norma (a nod to Norman Bates) and drives the same 1957 Ford that she drove to the Bates Motel. The license plate on the car reads “NFB 418” (Bates’s initials and birthday). When Norma drives away, you can hear a faint rendition of the screeching music from
Psycho
.

LAND OF THE DEAD
(2005)

I Spy...
Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright

Where to Find Them:
In a photo booth. Director George A. Romero, who began the modern zombie craze with 1968’s
Night of the Living Dead
, was so impressed with Pegg and Wright’s 2004 zombie comedy
Shaun of the Dead
that he invited the British funny men to make a cameo appearance as zombies in his latest movie. Pegg and Wright eagerly accepted.

First country to issue postage stamps: Great Britain, in 1840.

CIVIL WAR SIDENOTES

Everyone’s familiar with the big stories of America’s Civil War—Fort Sumter, Gettysburg, the Emancipation Proclamation, and so on. But a conflict that lasts four years, with more than 10,000 military engagements involving hundreds of thousands of people, is bound to yield a lot of little stories, too. Here are some you may not be familiar with
.

P
USHING THE ENVELOPE
Most Americans don’t know how close Floridians came to starting the Civil War. Upset by Lincoln’s election in November 1860, Florida secessionists hatched plans to seize Fort Barrancas, near Pensacola, and use its weapons—13 large-caliber cannons and howitzers, and several smaller guns—against Union troops. The secessionists watched for communiqués from Washington, D.C., knowing that if the Federal commander received orders to move his troops, they had to strike, even if it meant war. But no such orders came, so they waited. The moment Florida seceded on January 10, 1861, Confederate forces stormed the fort. They found it abandoned—Federal forces had withdrawn their weapons by barge to Fort Pickens in Pensacola Harbor just two days earlier. How did the orders get through? They were sealed in a scented pink envelope and addressed by a female hand, and no Southern gentleman would open, much less read, a lady’s love letter.

TURN THE OTHER CHEEK

Brigadier General Matt Ransom and 200 Confederate soldiers held a bridge on the Roanoke River against 5,000 Union soldiers. How did they do it? They battled “buck naked.” When Federal scouts came out of the woods, hundreds of Rebs who’d been skinny dipping in the millpond grabbed their muskets—instead of their clothes—and came out shooting. The scouts were so flustered, they hightailed it back to the forest. Then they tried to skirt around behind the enemy, but the swampy area at the back of the pond proved too big an obstacle. The Union soldiers must have kept their eyes closed the entire time: They managed to hit only one of the “naked jaybirds,” and according to reports, they never even saw the bridge they’d been sent to capture.

The four hotels at the intersection of Las Vegas Blvd. and Tropicana in Las Vegas have more hotel rooms than all the hotels in San Francisco combined.

TRIGGERNOMETRY

Union Major General John Sedgwick was a good leader and beloved by his men (they called him “Uncle John”), but he was also a bullet magnet. He took one at Frayser’s Farm and three at Antietam but kept on going. During the battle of Spotsylvania, near Fredericksburg, Virginia, his chief of staff told him to stay away from a certain section along the artillery battery because Confederate snipers had been taking potshots at every officer that showed himself along that line. Sedgwick laughed. The Rebs had to be a mile away—“They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance,” he said. A minute later, a bullet whistled across the battery, and Sedgwick fell to the ground. The sniper had a British Whitworth rifle with a telescopic sight, accurate to 1,500 yards—about a mile. When they rolled Uncle John over, he was dead... but he still had a smile on his face.

ROLL OUT THE BARREL

After battles ended, Union and Confederate generals often exchanged prisoners of war. The exchange rate: 15 privates for one colonel. One such exchange included Union Major General George Stoneman and his staff. Colonel James Biddle, another Union P.O.W., had been cooking for the men, and put his name on the list of privates, calling himself “Chief Commissary.” The ruse might have worked, but on the way to the exchange, Biddle was recognized by a Confederate officer, and the Union didn’t have enough prisoners to exchange for a colonel. “We have been hammering at each other for a long time,” Biddle pleaded. “Can’t you help me out?” The Rebs decided to see if terms could be arranged. While Biddle stewed inside the train car, the two sides compared prison rolls. It seemed to take forever. But that was a good thing: The Union negotiators brought a barrel of whiskey with them. They tapped the keg and relaxed over a few drinks as they compared lists. Then they had a few more drinks and a few more, and compared lists again. In the end, Stoneman was able to get the colonel released. “Biddle,” he confided, “to tell the truth, I believe you were exchanged for a keg of whiskey.”

DRESS UNIFORM

According to reports in the
Louisville Daily Journal
, 21-year-old
Sue Mundy had a fair complexion, long dark hair, and a “beautiful mouth.” But Mundy was no lady. In the final days of the Civil War, she led a band of Confederate raiders on a rampage across Kentucky. The
Journal
ran story after story about the desperate deeds of the female guerrilla and her gang, who, said the paper, burned railroad depots, robbed train passengers, attacked Federal wagon trains, and gunned down Yankee guards. On Sunday, March 12, 1865, fifty men from the 30th Wisconsin Volunteers, part of the Union’s forces in Kentucky, finally put an end to Mundy’s spree. Surrounded by troops, Sue fired with a revolver in each hand, wounding four soldiers, one fatally, but it was for naught. She was captured on Sunday, tried on Tuesday, and sentenced to hang on Wednesday. At the trial Mundy said, “I am not guilty of one-tenth of the outrages that have been charged” and blamed the
Journal
for exaggerating her exploits. Turns out the truth in this case was a mix of fact and fiction. The
Journal’s
editor, George Prentice, did exaggerate Sue Mundy’s deeds. He also invented the name “Sue Mundy” for the long-haired guerrilla. Reason: to embarrass the Union soldiers for being unable to catch a woman. So who was Sue Mundy who swung from the gallows? The notorious marauder’s last act was to write a note to a sweetheart back in Bloomfield, Kentucky:
My dear, I do truly and fondly ever love you. I am ever and truly yours. M. Jerome Clarke
. Sue Mundy was a man.