Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd (19 page)

Everyone’s amused by tales of outrageous blunders—probably because it’s comforting to know that someone’s screwing up worse than we are. So go ahead and feel superior for a few minutes.

B
ATTERY’S DONE

In Perth, Australia, in 2003, a man tried to charge his cell phone battery by putting it in his microwave. It didn’t work, but it caused an explosion and set his house on fire.

An Edmonton, Alberta, woman frantically called police in October 2003 to report that a letter she’d just opened had changed in color from white to pale yellow, to brown. A terrorist alert went out. Hazardous chemical officers in HAZMAT suits arrived and soon cracked the case. The letter had quickly changed color because it had been placed on an unseen puddle of coffee.

For almost 50 years, the official number of American troops killed in the Korean War stood at 54,246. In June 2000, the U.S. government announced that after the war a bureaucratic error had been made, miscounting the toll. Actual deaths: 36,940.

In 2002, Lim Ang Hing of Malaysia was given a speeding ticket …for driving 712 mph, nearly the speed of sound. While Lim admitted he was exceeding the 56 mph limit, he protested the number cited by police, claiming he was only going about 65. Police apologized for the “technical glitch.”

Poster seen on buses in Manhattan in 2002: “Are you an adult that cannot read? If so, we can help.” In related news, crossing guards who worked for schools in Glasgow, Scotland, in 2003 were sent a letter telling them that their paychecks could be provided
in Braille if they were blind (which would have made it difficult to be a crossing guard).

In 2002 Scott Boyes sat in a Bedfordshire, England, park and dozed off while reading a book called
Helping Yourself With Self-Hypnosis
. An hour later, Boyes woke to find that a thief had apparently helped
him
self…to Boyes’s cell phone and several shopping bags full of merchandise he’d just bought.

German intelligence officers were secretly bugging the phones of 50 suspected criminals in 2002. The operation fell apart when bills for the phone-tapping service were sent to the 50 people who were being monitored.

In 2006 an irate Lewes, England, man called police to complain of a ringing alarm that had been blaring incessantly for over a week. After a brief investigation, it was discovered the sound was coming from an old smoke alarm in the man’s garden shed.

Sometimes companies don’t think about unintended results when they register Web site addresses. Some unluckily named business Web sites include ones for pen seller Pen Island (
penisland.com
), celebrity agent directory Who Represents (
whorepresents.com
), Italian electric company Italian Power Generator (
powergenitalia.com
), and the design firm Speed of Art (
speedofart.com
).

Steve Wynn, a Las Vegas casino owner and real estate agent, owns the Pablo Picasso painting
The Dream
. He had arranged to sell the painting in 2006 for $139 million, but before parting with it he had some friends over to his office to show it off. At the party, Wynn was waving his hands around as he told a friend a story. He lost his balance and fell backward into the painting, puncturing it with what one guest later called “a $40 million elbow.” Wynn had to cancel the sale.

Thirty years ago, he was a professional soccer player in England. Today, he lectures people about the shape-shifting reptilian humanoids from outer space who run the world.

R
ISING STAR

David Icke was born to poor parents in Leicester, England, in 1952. Raised in public housing, he left his family and school at age 17 to play professional soccer. Icke was a star goalie for two teams but had to retire at only 21: The arthritis in his knee, which had plagued him since the beginning of his career, had now become unbearable.

His lifelong ambition and career were over after just four years. Icke didn’t know what to do next, so he returned to Leicester. In 1973, he got a job writing for a small local newspaper, and discovered that he actually liked reporting. He stuck with it, ascending through media jobs in radio, local television, and then to the BBC where he became a nationally known sportscaster.

In the mid-1980s, Icke became interested in politics and publicly spoke out on the importance of preserving the environment. In 1988, he left the BBC because he felt it was inappropriate for a news personality to speak out about world events. So he joined Britain’s Green Party, which, banking on Icke’s national recognition, made him their national spokesman. Icke had changed careers yet again. Now he was a full-time activist. In 1990 he wrote a book about environmentalism entitled
It Doesn’t Have to Be Like This.

Over 20 years’ time, Icke had gone from poor kid on welfare to professional athlete to sportscaster to politician. That would qualify as a full life for anybody. But then Icke’s entire world made a really bizarre shift. In March 1990, Icke claims a female “spirit” spoke to him. What did she say? She told Icke that he was “the chosen one,” a man blessed with a gift to heal and was put on Earth in
order to save it. The spirit further informed him that his meandering life had been predestined: soccer had taught him discipline and journalism gave him the ability to communicate with large groups of people. According to the spirit, all of it was preparation for his new role…as a prophet. One other thing Icke claims the spirit told him: within a few years, a massive earthquake would destroy the entire world, and the oceans would overtake the land as a punishment to humankind for transgressions against nature.

Icke reported his experience to the Green Party leaders, who thought he was crazy and would make the party look bad. They immediately fired him. Now jobless and convinced he was a prophet, Icke made a “spiritual journey” to Peru in 1991. When he returned to England, he began to wear only turquoise-colored clothes and held a press conference to announce that not only was he “chosen,” he was
the
chosen one—a “channel for the Christ spirit.” He received the news, he said, during another encounter with a supernatural entity. “The title was given to me very recently by the Godhead,” meaning Icke believed the Holy Spirit—the spiritual essence of God—told him that he was, essentially, the second coming of Jesus Christ.

Icke hadn’t been a major public figure for several years, so the press conference wasn’t widely attended or reported. So a few months later Icke went on Terry Wogan’s popular BBC talk show to announce once again that he was Christ incarnate, as well as to warn England that planet-devastating earthquakes and tidal waves were scheduled to hit soon, with the British Isles the first to be destroyed. How did England react to this mind-blowing information? Wogan’s studio audience roared with laughter. The next day, newspaper columnists and TV comedians suggested that Icke was mentally ill. Few people, if any, took him seriously.

“As a television presenter, I’d been respected. And overnight, it was transformed into ‘Icke’s a nutter,’” he told one reporter. Icke went into seclusion and became a prolific writer. At first he wrote mainly about his “prophecies” and “special powers,” but then something in Icke snapped. No longer a peaceful “nutter,” he
turned dark and paranoid. Icke became obsessed with exposing “The Brotherhood,” a massive network of secret societies that he claimed runs the world and everything in it.

Icke’s main source for his theories is his “psychic link to the spirit world,” (which conveniently clears him of the burden of having to actually prove any of his theories), but he also consults
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
a 90-year-old book that supposedly details a plan by Jewish leaders to achieve world domination through media and financial control. The book is an infamous anti-Semitic hoax, originally written as propaganda by the Tsarist secret police in Russia in 1916.

Yet despite being debunked, Icke trusts the book, claiming the secret society
wants
you to believe their insidious plan is a hoax. Here’s how he says the world really works: At the top of the Brotherhood are the “Prison Warders,” a group of Satan-worshippers with a single goal—absolute world domination. They use mind control to manipulate the world’s economies, banks, military, schools, media, religion, drug companies, organized crime, and spy agencies. They also stage massive catastrophes which cause people to react emotionally, then unwittingly do the Brotherhood’s bidding. For instance, according to Icke’s book
Infinite Love Is the Only Truth, Everything Else is Illusion,
religions are a creation of the Brotherhood. They create conflicts which make humans easier to divide and conquer. Another example: The terrorist attacks of 9/11 were staged by the Brotherhood to encourage anti-Muslim feelings and gain support for a war in the Middle East.

Icke offers an even stranger twist: the Prison Warders aren’t human—they are descended from a race of reptiles who came to conquer Earth from a planet in a distant constellation called Draco. Icke says they live in subterranean caves. Further, the most powerful members of the Brotherhood, the Prison Warders, can gain the ability to shapeshift and assume the appearance of normal human beings…by drinking human blood.

But there’s a bright side: the Prison Warders are not a secret, shadow government of unknown figures operating from a secret
location. Many are history and modern day’s most well-known and powerful leaders, including the British royal family, the Bush family, Hillary (but not Bill) Clinton, British prime ministers Harold Wilson and Tony Blair, the Rockefellers, and, Icke inexplicably insists, 1970s country music singer Boxcar Willie. In a 1999 interview, Christine Fitzgerald, a friend of the late Princess Diana, reportedly told Icke that Diana had witnessed Queen Elizabeth II change from a reptile into a humanoid.

The view that all humans are under the control of hideous vampire lizards isn’t even Icke’s most controversial theory: He says the reptiles are Jewish. But Icke insists allegations that he’s anti-Semitic are “friggin’ nonsense.” Icke says his qualm is with Jewish
reptiles
, not Jewish people. Yet it’s hard not to think Icke has racist motives when he claims that “the white race” is most susceptible to getting their blood consumed by the lizards because they consider white people with blue eyes to be the peak of sexual desirability. (Note: David Icke is a white man with blue eyes.)

In January 2003, Icke’s theories took another turn during a visit to Brazil, where a shaman gave him heavy doses of
Ayahuasca
, a hallucinogenic rainforest plant with mind-altering effects similar to peyote. While one might consider Icke to be spouting the rambling nonsense of someone on drugs
before
he went to Brazil, Icke says the experience “completely transformed my view of life. What it did was take my intellectual understanding that the world is an illusion into the realms of knowing it’s an illusion and there’s a difference between intellectually understanding it’s an illusion and this level of knowing it because you’ve experienced it.”

In other words, no need to worry about the reptile overlords… because, according to Icke, the man who said they exist, they don’t
actually
exist. They’re just an illusion.

*       *       *

Popular new snack food in Quebec:
communion wafers. People in the traditionally Catholic area buy them by the bagful. They are reportedly low in fat and calories.

Is this series of Bathroom News stories really any odder than what we put in our
regular
books? Perhaps not, but when you think about it…all bathroom news is kind of odd, isn’t it?

F
LUSH BEFORE YOU FLY!

China Southern Airlines was losing money. Watching their profits dwindle while fuel prices rose, the airline needed to find new ways to save fuel. They found one, but its success was entirely dependent on their customers’ cooperation. Passengers are given a simple request at the airport: “Please go to the bathroom before you board the plane.” Why? Because every time an airplane toilet flushes, it uses up to a liter of fuel. “The energy used in one flush is enough for an economical car to run at least 10 kilometers,” says pilot Liu Zhiyuan, who always makes sure that he does his business on the ground before doing it in the air.