Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (78 page)

ERNESTO “CHE” GUEVARA (1928–67)

Claim to Fame:
A Cuban revolutionary leader and Fidel Castro’s right-hand man

Buried:
Guevara was in Bolivia trying to overthrow the government there when he was captured and executed in October 1967. His hands were cut off and sent to Buenos Aires for fingerprint identification; the rest of his body, and those of six other revolutionaries, were buried in unmarked graves in a secret location to prevent them from becoming a pilgrimage site.

Exhumed:
It wasn’t until 1995 that a retired Bolivian general revealed the location of the graves—near an airstrip in the town of Vallegrande, Bolivia. It took a year to find the graves, one of them did contain the body of a man whose hands had been removed. The teeth from that body matched Guevara’s dental records. In 1997 he and the other guerrillas were returned to Cuba and interred in a mausoleum in the city of Santa Clara.

MORE STRANGE
CELEBRITY LAWSUITS

Here are a few more real-life examples of unusual legal battles involving famous people
.

T
HE PLAINTIFF:
Aaron Fraser, CEO of Lebron Jordan, Inc., a Brooklyn, New York, online athletic shoe company
THE DEFENDANTS:
Nike, Michael Jordan, and LeBron James

THE LAWSUIT:
Nike’s two best-known celebrity endorsers are NBA superstars LeBron James and Michael Jordan. That’s why the shoe company, along with representatives of the athletes, sent several cease-and-desist letters to Fraser’s company, Lebron Jordan. The letters demanded that Fraser stop using the trademarked names and remove from his website any shoe that bears any resemblance to Air Jordans and Converse All-Stars (which Nike also owns). Fraser neither ceased nor desisted. Instead, he slapped Nike and both athletes with a whopping $900 million lawsuit. Fraser said he lost a “multi-million dollar account” because the defendants had “dragged his good name through the press,” and pointed out that Nike had trademarked the individual names “LeBron” and “Jordan,” but not “Lebron Jordan” together. (And Fraser’s “Lebron” has a little “b.”) Besides, Fraser added, he named his company after his two godsons, whose names just happen to be Lebron and Jordan. A Nike official called the suit “groundless”—merely a ploy by Fraser to get more publicity.

THE VERDICT:
As predicted, the lawsuit generated a lot of publicity for Lebron Jordan (it even got him mentioned in a
Bathroom Reader
). The lawsuit was still pending at press time.

THE PLAINTIFF:
Carl Mayer, a New York Jets football fan

THE DEFENDANT:
Bill Belichick, head coach of the NFL’s New England Patriots

THE LAWSUIT:
Mayer, a lawyer, sued Belichick for cheating.

A whale caught near Alaska in 2007 had the tip of an 1880s harpoon stuck in its skin.

He filed his class-action suit in 2007 in the wake of what the press called “Spygate.” At a Jets home game, Belichick’s coaching staff was caught secretly videotaping Jets coaches in an attempt to learn their plays. Mayer sought $185 million, to be divvied up between every Jets season ticket holder who paid to watch any home game against the Patriots since 2000, when Belichick became head coach. During the trial, the judge asked Belichick’s lawyer, “Do you think someone would pay that kind of money for tickets if they knew in advance it wasn’t a fair game?” The lawyer replied, “Given what I know about professional sports, yes.” He then added, “Every spectator that goes to a game expects there will be rules infractions.”

THE VERDICT:
Apparently cheating
is
an expected part of the game. Mayer lost. He appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case. But Belichick didn’t get off scot-free: The NFL fined him $500,000 and his team $250,000, plus they were stripped of a first-round draft pick.

THE PLAINTIFF:
Quentin Tarantino, Oscar-winning Hollywood screenwriter (
Pulp Fiction
)

THE DEFENDANT:
Alan Ball, Oscar-winning Hollywood screenwriter (
American Beauty
)

THE LAWSUIT:
The press called it the “Angry Birds” case. Tarantino, who is Ball’s neighbor in Southern California, complained that for two years, starting in 2009, Ball’s pet macaws made “obnoxious pterodactyl-like screams” to the point where Tarantino couldn’t concentrate on writing his new film script. (It’s a spaghetti Western called
Django Unchained
.) Ball, who created the HBO shows
Six Feet Under
and
True Blood
, attempted to quiet down his exotic birds. He even built a soundproof aviary, but then just couldn’t bring himself to keep them caged. By then, Tarantino had had enough. In March 2011, he sued Ball to have the birds removed for good.

THE VERDICT:
The case was settled out of court. Details were few, but it seems that the macaws have been muffled, which has allowed Tarantino to finally finish his script. His lawyer calls it “the best script Quentin’s ever written.” (No word on whether any angry birds get a dose of Western justice in the film.)

NY’s Adirondack Park covers 6 million acres, more than Yellowstone and Yosemite combined.

MR. TROLOLO

Our final installment of “Viral Videos” features a Web phenomenon four decades in the making
.

I
nternet Star:
Eduard Khil (pronounced “Hill”), 74, a pop singer from St. Petersburg, Russia
The Story:
Famous in Russia since the 1960s, Khil was virtually unheard of in the United States until 2009. Then someone posted a video from a 1976 Russian TV show in which he lip-syncs to his 1966 hit song—“I Am Glad Because I Am Finally Returning Back Home”—on YouTube.

The video is strangely compelling: Wearing a brown polyester suit with a yellow tie, Khil slowly strolls onto a cheesy orange-and-yellow set, bouncing in time to the cheesy bossa nova music. He seems almost robotic as he smiles the entire time and waves to nobody in particular. But what makes it truly unique are the nonsense lyrics Khil sings in his operatic baritone. Sample: “Yaya-yaya-ya yaya-ya yaya-ya / Oo oo oo oo / ahh EEEE! / Trololololo!”

What Happened:
Khil is now known on the Web as “Mr. Trololo,” and his video and its dozens of parodies have amassed tens of millions of hits. Even a 2009 video of Khil watching Youtube parodies of himself (and commenting on them in Russian) got half a million views. American fans started a Facebook page urging him to come out of retirement and tour again, but he said he has no plans to perform live. However, Khil did post a video response thanking everyone for the renewed interest in a 40-year-old song. He also has a request that “all the people of the world” contribute actual lyrics to the song, and “we will all sing together.” Overjoyed by his newfound stardom, Khil told his fans, “Thank you for getting this supply of cheerfulness and optimism while listening to this melody.”

Bonus:
Why doesn’t the song have any actual words? Khil’s lyricist did write some—about a cowboy from Kentucky longing for his woman (who is at home knitting him some stockings)—but Soviet sensors banned the lyrics, so Khil recorded it with the nonsense words instead. (Uncle John’s challenge: Watch Mr. Trololo online and then try
not
to sing the melody out loud.)

In a day, your brain uses the amount of energy contained in 2 large bananas.

HIGH CULTURE

Using marijuana for recreational purposes is illegal almost everywhere in the world, which is why some people go to Amsterdam and other cities in the Netherlands where smoking pot is legal in specialized “coffee shops.” That has led to a misconception that drugs are legal there. They’re not—it’s a divisive political issue with a long, complicated history. Here’s the real story about what you thought you knew about Amsterdam
.

A
HISTORY OF TOLERANCE
Before the year 1600 or so, the progressive, commercial and artistic centers of Europe were unquestionably Paris and Florence. The Netherlands was regarded as a boring backwater with little to offer. But then the Netherlands came into its own. An influx of new ideas and technology heralded the Dutch Golden Age, a period of excellence in both art (“the Dutch masters” such as Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Frans Hals) and commerce. The city of Antwerp grew into Europe’s leading financial center, and the Dutch East India Company, the first international corporation (and the biggest in history until the 20th century), dominated world goods trading and led European powers in the colonization and commercialization of the New World.

Like America in the Industrial Age, the Netherlands in the 17th century was the land of opportunity. Tens of thousands flocked there, from skilled workers to financiers to religious refugees. The influx of people helped run the country’s new, powerful economic machine, so the Dutch government didn’t respond to religious and ethnic diversity the way other western European countries had. (England persecuted Catholics and Spain persecuted Jews.) Instead, they tolerated it. In a concept called
pillarisation
, laws were passed to allow people of
any
ethnic or religious background to hold office. The idea of adapting to change through tolerance (and legislation) would come to define the nation’s cultural and political mindset into the 20th century.

THE BEAT GOES ON

Maybe because the country went through so much turmoil in the 1800s and 1900s—occupations by Napoleon and Hitler, respectively—tolerance gave way to permissiveness in the years after World War II. Laws decriminalizing prostitution, doctor-assisted suicide, homosexuality, and abortion were passed in the Netherlands in the 1950s, decades before the issues were even discussed in polite company in other first-world countries.

It would take a jumbo jet about 120 million years to fly across the Milky Way galaxy.

Along with such relaxed (or progressive) attitudes came an increase in the use of recreational drugs—similar to the way the chaotic social and political climate of the late ’60s led to increased drug use in the United States. Despite the fact that possession of the drug could result in a prison sentence, marijuana use became increasingly common among Dutch youth. At the same time, use of harder drugs such as heroin was on the rise, and the government’s attention began to turn toward
that
problem. Without the time or resources to combat marijuana—and given the country’s tradition of tolerance—police began to turn a blind eye to marijuana use, and the drug’s image began to soften. Result: In 1971 marijuana possession was downgraded to a misdemeanor offense.

THE FLOODGATES OPEN

That didn’t make marijuana completely legal, though—adults could possess the drug, but it was still illegal to smoke it in public. Entrepreneurs in the nation’s largest city, Amsterdam, decided to push the limits of the law by opening “coffee shops” that sold coffee...and marijuana. As a gray area between private and public, the shops invited controversy and were routinely raided by police. But they were never shut down.

This was the pattern for years in Amsterdam. The number of shops grew, and the number of police raids declined. Once again, tolerance won out: In 1976, lawmakers enacted a series of sweeping new marijuana laws. Outright legalization wasn’t an option because as a member of the United Nations, the Netherlands was legally obligated to
fight
drug trafficking. The Dutch government skirted that agreement by using a strict coffee-shop model. Marijuana would be legal to sell and consume specifically at the coffee shops, but there were rules: Minors were forbidden to enter the shops, advertising was illegal, and limits were placed on both the amount of marijuana that could be sold to customers and the amount a shopkeeper could keep on the premises at any time.

In the 1920s, the Raggedy Ann doll was used as a symbol by the anti-vaccination movement.

SNUFFED OUT

One problem with rules: They only work if people follow them. A handful of shops openly flouted the laws by selling harder drugs, such as cocaine and heroin. Other European governments began to criticize the Netherlands publicly for ignoring its United Nations anti-drug-trafficking pledge. Dutch citizens weren’t happy either; people living in Amsterdam and Rotterdam grew tired of putting up with “drug tourists” from Europe and the United States. By 1995 the government was ready to act again...and this time they didn’t choose tolerance. They shut down half of the Amsterdam coffee shops (that amounted to more than 100 businesses). And a controversial measure in Rotterdam closed all coffee shops within 250 meters of a school, reducing the number of shops in that city by 25 percent.

Despite the crackdown, tolerance lives on. The Dutch don’t seem to want to completely ban marijuana—a 2008 proposal by one Dutch lawmaker to recriminalize it, which would close
all
coffee shops, failed to gain support. But tolerance goes only so far. In June 2011, the national government passed a law banning noncitizens from setting foot in coffee shops altogether. That will make them “locals only” private clubs that require membership. Amsterdam’s reputation as the “Las Vegas of Europe” may be coming to an end...unless you’re Dutch.