Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (64 page)

• According to a College Board survey of more than a million students, 70 percent believed they were made of superior leadership material. A whopping 85 percent believed that they were better than average at getting along with others, with 25 percent saying they were in the top 1 percent.

• When estimating their own IQ, men and women guess wrong by the same average amount—five points. However, there’s one crucial difference: On average, men tend to
overestimate
their IQ by five points, while women tend to
underestimate
by the same amount.

• It also turns out that North Americans are the group most susceptible to this false sense of superiority. Studies of East Asians found that the majority
underestimate
their abilities, which spurs them toward continuous self-improvement. And when Swedes and Americans were asked the same questions about their driving abilities, 69% of the Swedes believed they had above-average driving abilities compared to 93% of the Americans.

SMARTY PANTS

Illusory superiority is also known in the field as “the Lake Wobegon effect,” which refers to Garrison Keillor’s sign-off to
A Prairie Home Companion
, a radio program that features monologues about his fictional hometown of Lake Wobegon, where “all of the children are above average.”

Luckily,
we
can’t possibly be that deluded, right?

“Relax. What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind!”

—
Homer Simpson

During the Alaskan gold rush, potatoes were worth their weight in gold.

RANDOM BITS ON
MICHAEL JACKSON HITS

If you find this page bad and not a thriller, Uncle John respectfully suggests that you beat it
.

“You Are Not Alone”:
Released in 1995, it was the first song ever to debut at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

“Scream”:
Jackson was a devout Jehovah’s Witness and steadfastly refused to use profanity. “Scream,” a duet with his sister Janet Jackson, is the only time he ever swore in a song: “Just stop messing with me / just stop f***ing with me / make me want to scream.”

“Thriller”:
Horror movie legend Vincent Price recorded his spoken-word interlude in just two takes. Songwriter Rod Temperton wrote it in a taxi on the way to Price’s recording session.

“Bad”:
Jackson planned it as a duet with Prince. Prince backed out over lyrical content. (He was reportedly uncomfortable with the song’s first line, “Your butt is mine.”)

“I Just Can’t Stop Loving You”:
Another duet for the
Bad
album, which Jackson wrote to perform with Whitney Houston. She had recorded three hit duets with Jackson’s brother Jermaine, but turned this one down. So did Barbra Streisand. Who got the gig? An unknown backup singer named Siedah Garrett, who also co-wrote “Man in the Mirror” with Jackson.

“Wanna Be Startin’ Something”:
Jackson was sued for stealing the song’s African-influenced chorus from the 1972 landmark disco song “Soul Makossa” by Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango. (They settled out of court.)

“Beat It”:
Eddie Van Halen played the song’s guitar solo as a favor to producer Quincy Jones. He was uncredited and unpaid for his work, apart from the two six-packs of beer Jones gave him during the recording session.

What’s
rhinorrhea
? The medical term for snot. (What’s
rhinorhinorrhea
? Rhino snot.)

JUST PLANE WEIRD:
BATHROOM EDITION

If you happen to be reading this page in an airplane restroom, you might want to save it for when you’re in a bathroom on the ground
.

M
UCH BETTER NOW, THANKS
Not long after the Air Antilles flight lifted off from the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe bound for St. Martin in March 2011, one of the passengers complained of feeling ill and spent the rest of the flight in the bathroom. When the plane was about to land, he asked for an ambulance to meet him at the airport. The plane landed, the ambulance pulled up...and the man said he suddenly felt better and didn’t need medical assistance after all. He walked out of the airport, bypassing all the usual security and immigration checks, and disappeared. The first sign that something was amiss came when airplane cleaners found a bundle of money in the bathroom; the second sign came when one of the other passengers, a Brink’s guard transporting $1.6 million in cash (stored in a cargo hold next to the bathroom), noticed that some of it was missing. The “sick” man had spent the entire flight taking apart the bathroom to get to the cash, and had walked off the plane $238,000 richer. He hasn’t been seen since.

A BATHROOM BREAK TO REMEMBER

In May 2010, an Air India Express 737 was flying from Dubai to India when the pilot left the cabin for a bathroom break. While he was gone, the co-pilot tried to adjust his seat. In the process he accidentally struck the control column and sent the plane into a steep dive. The panicked co-pilot couldn’t pull the plane out of the dive. Not only that—he couldn’t unlock the cockpit door to let the pilot back in, so that
he
could pull the plane out of the dive. The pilot gained access by entering an emergency code, and then saved the plane. (“We hit an air pocket,” he told the terrified passengers.) An investigation later determined that had the pilot not taken control when he did, the plane likely would have broken apart in midair.

Theory of Relativity fact: Clocks run slightly faster on mountaintops than at sea level.

PRE-FLIGHT PIT STOP

In January 2009, two Southwest Airlines passengers were going through security at Ohio’s Port Columbus Airport when they noticed that the pilot just ahead of them “looked and smelled drunk.” Worried that he might be
their
pilot (he wasn’t), they confronted him—and he ran off. A few minutes later, airport police found him hiding in an airport bathroom. By then he’d already ditched his pilot’s uniform and called in sick from inside the bathroom. Too late. Southwest suspended him with pay and launched an investigation into the incident. (The pilot admitted to police that he’d “partied hard” in his hotel room the night before, but said he had not had anything to drink that morning.)

BREATHLESS

In February 2011, the Federal Aviation Agency ordered every U.S. airline to dismantle the oxygen generators (those things that drop out of the ceiling if the plane loses cabin pressure) in airplane bathrooms. Apparently, the government is worried that terrorists might be able to use the equipment to start a fire or set off a bomb in the bathroom. So are you doomed if the plane loses pressure while you’re on the pot? No, but you may be embarrassed: As soon as the flight attendants put on their own oxygen masks, they will unlock the bathrooms and pass bottles of oxygen in to anyone caught with their pants down. The FAA is working with airplane manufacturers to come up with a safer oxygen system...just for bathrooms.

COOKIE MONSTER

A San Francisco man named Kinman Chan was on a flight from Philadelphia to Los Angeles in early 2010 when he locked himself in the bathroom and started screaming. When he came out of the bathroom (with his pants around his ankles) he elbowed a flight attendant. Bad move: She was a black belt in tae kwon do. She restrained Chan in a choke hold and then handcuffed him for the rest of the flight. The plane was diverted to Pittsburgh and Chan was turned over to the FBI. He blames his bizarre behavior on the marijuana cookies he eats to treat a medical condition. “Chan advised me he has a medical marijuana card and he took double his normal dose,” an FBI agent noted in an affidavit.

There’s enough copper on the roof of Arizona’s capitol building to make 4.8 million pennies.

NAKED NEWS

All the nudes that’s fit to print
.

I
n the Ruff.
Streaking was a strange fad in the ’70s. Naked, running people interrupted all sorts of things, from the 1975 Academy Awards to football, baseball, and basketball games. In 2010, Mark Roberts of Liverpool, England, became the first person to streak a dog show. He showed up at the 2010 Crufts Dog Show in Birmingham, England wearing nothing but a cat face painted over his private parts. Roberts had previously streaked a benefit for poor children and a morning TV weather report.

Just the Facts, Ma’am.
Fort Pierce, Florida, police pulled over Ellena Lucia Barron late one night in 2009 for a routine traffic stop. Barron had nothing to hide and wasn’t carrying anything illegal, but she still panicked. She told the officer she had to get something out of her trunk, and emerged from the car with her shirt off. “I thought that’s what you wanted to see,” Barron told the officer. He didn’t. She was charged with indecent exposure.

Flash ’n’ Splash.
In 2010 Melanie King and Annie Januszewski set out to beat the two-woman transatlantic rowing record from Europe to the West Indies. The record is 75 days, but they thought they could shave time off through improved aerodynamics—by being totally nude for the whole trip. Januszewski and King did complete the trip nude...but it took them 77 days.

Poopy Excuse.
David Napodano of Lehich Acres, Florida, was arrested in 2009 for exposing himself to two women in a grocery store parking lot. Creepy? Yes, but he had an excuse: Napodano told police that he was standing in the parking lot naked because he’d had a bout of “explosive diarrhea” and had used his underwear to clean himself up. (That actually makes it creepier.)

Clothes Call.
Julia Laack was accused of shoplifting a lighter and some beef jerky from a Sheboygan, Wisconsin, convenience store. When police went to Laack’s home, she took off all of her clothes and, while naked, tried to attack them. Laack later explained that she thought that “a naked person can’t be arrested.”

World’s largest rodeo: the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo (2 million spectators a year).

FAMOUS FOR
HOW THEY DIED

What if the most interesting thing that ever happened to you was the
last
thing that ever happened to you? That was the case for these people
.

S
IR ARTHUR ASTON (1590–1649)
Who He Was:
A British army officer who sided with the losing Royalist forces of King Charles I in the English Civil War

How He Died:
Beaten to death with a wooden leg

Details:
In 1649 Aston was the governor of Drogheda, a walled town on the east coast of Ireland that was one of the last Royalist strongholds. That September, Oliver Cromwell, leader of the opposing Parliamentarian forces, arrived with superior numbers. After blasting two openings in the wall, Cromwell offered Aston and his garrison of 3,000 men the chance to surrender without further bloodshed. Aston refused, and Cromwell stormed the town. On his orders, the entire garrison was put to death, including Aston, who, rumor had it, had gold coins hidden inside his wooden leg. Cromwell’s soldiers searched the leg, and when they found no gold, they beat Aston to death with it.

LEN KOENECKE (1904–35)

Who He Was:
An outfielder for the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers in the early 1930s

How He Died:
Extinguished in mid-air

Details:
Koenecke had a good year in 1934 but slipped badly in 1935 when both his playing and his drinking became erratic. Dodgers manager Casey Stengel cut him from the team in the middle of a road trip through the Midwest. On the American Airlines flight home to New York, Koenecke downed a quart of whiskey, then fought with another passenger and had to be restrained by the co-pilot. Thrown off the flight when it stopped in Detroit, he chartered a small plane to fly him to Buffalo. He was drunk on that flight too, and after the pilot refused his request to perform aerial stunts, Koenecke grabbed for the controls and
tried to crash the plane. The pilot and the one other passenger battled Koenecke for about 15 minutes before the pilot finally knocked him senseless by bashing him repeatedly over the head with the plane’s fire extinguisher. By the time the plane made an emergency landing on a racetrack outside of Toronto, Koenecke was dead from his injuries.

Most ancient Romans lived in apartment buildings.

FRANK HAYES (1888–1923)

Who He Was:
An American jockey in the early 1920s