Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd (20 page)

A Russian couple were relaxing in the living room of their apartment after dinner one evening. At the same time, in the apartment directly above, a woman was relaxing in her bathtub, soaking in the warm water, her head back, eyes closed, thoughts meandering, starting to doze offffffff.......
creeeeeeak
.......
CRACK! (crumble crumble) CRASH!
“EEEEE-Ahhhhggh!”
THUD!
After the tub and ceiling plaster landed on the floor below, the dazed woman looked up out of the tub to see the couple staring at her in bewilderment. She later told reporters, “They seemed as shocked as I was when they saw me lying there. Naked. In the bath. In the middle of their living room.”

In late 2005, seemingly out of nowhere and without explanation, Barbie dolls suddenly began appearing in the ladies’ bathrooms of coffee shops in the Lincoln, Nebraska, area. The first sighting occurred at The Mill, when a barista walked into the ladies’ room one morning and found a Malibu Barbie standing on the paper towel holder. A few days later, another was found perched on top
of a stall wall. Then more Barbies began showing up at other coffee shops…and it creeped out the staff. “You go to clean and there’s a Barbie doll staring up at you. It’s scary. I won’t go in there anymore,” said barista Jamie Yost. All of the Barbies were in pristine condition and came on stands (which pointed toward a collector as the culprit). Shop owners tried everything short of installing video cameras in the bathrooms to catch the woman responsible. But then, a few months after they first appeared, the Barbie visits abruptly stopped (most likely because whoever was putting them there ran out of the dolls). The mystery was never solved.

Michael Jackson made a pitstop in a Dubai shopping mall to touch up his make-up…in the women’s bathroom. The pop star said it was a mistake (after all, the signs
are
in Arabic), but that doesn’t mean it didn’t enrage the Dubai citizens—especially women. For one thing, Jackson was wearing a headdress that, by Arab custom, is only be worn by females. For another, a woman who emerged from her stall was startled to see the King of Pop applying make-up to a face that has been described as “disconcerting.” Recognizing the star, the woman used her cell-phone camera to take pictures of him. That’s when Jackson screamed. His body guards rushed into the bathroom and forcefully confiscated the woman’s cell phone and deleted the pictures. They spilled out of the bathroom, causing a melee between Jackson’s bodyguards and mall cops. The ordeal culminated with the confused pop star being rushed into his heavily fortified SUV. Jackson was not charged, which further angered Muslim women. “Michael Jackson might be a big name,” said one. “But it does not give him the right to go into a ladies’ washroom!”

*       *       *

“It’s better to have a relationship with someone who cheats on you than someone who doesn’t flush the toilet.”

—
Uma Thurman

Noblemen are usually dignified people who act with grace. Just as often, they’re fools made insane by generations of blue-blooded inbreeding.

T
HE HERMIT OF NOTTINGHAMSHIRE

William John Cavendish Scott-Bentinck (1800–1879) was a member of England’s parliament before he was 30, and seemed destined for a serious career in politics. Then his uncle died in 1854 and Scott-Bentinck inherited the title of fifth Duke of Portland. Almost immediately, the new duke rejected public life, preferring to be alone—
very
alone. He moved into his newly inherited estate in Nottinghamshire and quickly rid the house of everything in it, tossing most of his family’s priceless treasures into a huge pile in one empty room. Scott-Bentinck then dedicated five empty rooms of the house for his living quarters, and had the rest of the empty house painted pink. But apparently that wasn’t secluded enough, so the duke commissioned the construction of a series of underground rooms connected by 15 miles of tunnels. Among the subterranean rooms were a 11,000-square foot ballroom and a billiard room large enough to house 12 pool tables. But nobody ever saw them; no visitors were ever permitted. In fact, from 1854 until his death in 1879, Scott-Bentinck saw only one person—his valet.

Matthew Robinson, the second Baron Rokeby (1713–1800), was from a Scottish noble family that lived in Kent, England. He inherited the title in his 40s and served in the House of Lords. Then Robinson took a vacation in the German spa-resort town of Aachen. When he returned to Kent, Robinson was suddenly and permanently obsessed with water. He started skipping work and spent most of his days swimming in the ocean at a private beach in Kent. Every day Robinson walked to and from the beach wearing tattered peasant clothes, and would then swim for so long and so strenuously that he’d faint, requiring a servant to drag him out of the sea. Robinson drank lots of water, too, and he had drinking
fountains installed along the path to the beach. If commoners were caught using them, Robinson didn’t punish them—he gave them a gold coin to reward “their good taste.” Robinson’s embarrassed family eventually talked him into installing a swimming pool at his home. He still spent most of the day swimming, but now tried to prevent fainting by eating a roast leg of veal… underwater.

Francis Henry Egerton, the eighth earl of Bridgewater (1756–1829), wasn’t a hermit, but he didn’t care much for the company of people. He liked dogs. Throughout his life he always had 12 of them, and he liked to dress them in tiny, specially made leather boots to protect their paws. Every day, six of the dogs would join him on a carriage ride, then the menagerie would return home for dinner. At a long dinner table, all 12 dogs—and Egerton—would eat off of silver with white linen napkins tied around their necks. Egerton liked the dinners for the lively conversations he imagined he was having with the dogs. Egerton also liked his own shoes, wearing a new pair everyday. At night he hung the used shoes on the wall as a makeshift calendar.

Edward Hyde (1661–1723) was the third Earl of Clarendon and a cousin of Queen Anne of England. In 1701, Anne appointed Hyde to the position of governor of the American colonies of New York and New Jersey. Hyde took the task seriously and literally: He said that if he was governing the colonies on behalf of a woman, he should dress the part. So at the opening of the New York Assembly in 1702, Hyde attended wearing a blue silk gown and satin shoes, waving his face with a fan. Outside of work, he was often spotted on the streets wearing a hoop skirt. By 1708, Hyde was forced to relinquish the governorship and return to England because he was deeply in debt from spending too much money on women’s clothes.

*       *       *

“Why doesn’t Tarzan have a beard?”

—
George Carlin

Godzilla. Mothra. Rodan. Polite gangs, sewage sausage, and stolen pants.
Konichiwa!

N
EVER A-SUMO YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH IT

In March 2006, Konoshin Kawabata, 48, snuck into a Buddhist temple in Osaka, planning to rob it. After gathering some antiques and other valuables, he was looking for an exit and opened an unmarked door. Behind the door was the last thing he’d expected: 20 sumo wrestlers. Kawabata tried to make a getaway, but was quickly stopped by the wrestlers.

In 2001, a 25-year-old woman was arrested for multiple violations of the Waste Disposal Act. Her crime: Every week for a year, the Toyoda resident, who was being treated for bulimia, went to forests, streams, and other wilderness areas and dumped plastic bags filled with her own vomit. More than 60 pounds of it was discovered. The woman said she dumped it in remote places because if she disposed of it at home, she might get caught and then she’d be embarrassed.

Japanese men tend to work extremely long hours. Result: They’re never home. The difficult work schedule has created a new medical condition called Retired Husband Syndrome. But it doesn’t affect the men; it afflicts their wives. As men in Japan reach retirement age, more and more of them stay home and boss around their wives, who are used to being alone all day and doing things their own way. Doctors have linked the resulting stress to an increase in the occurrence of skin rashes and ulcers in women.

In 2004, Kobe police caught Kenji Hishida stealing railway employee uniform pants from a train station office. Police searched Hishida’s home and discovered pants from dozens of different transportation companies. Hishida later admitted that he’d
been stealing pants for 15 years and had accumulated more than 10,000 pairs.

Japanese culture places a high value on politeness and cleanliness. Even the criminals adhere. In 1992, the Yamaguchi-gumi, one of Japan’s biggest organized-crime syndicates, publicly announced a new honor code. Group members were advised
not
to throw cigarette butts on the ground or hand out business cards with their gang’s logo in between criminal acts so as “to not inconvenience the public.”

In 1993, the Environmental Assessment Center of Okayama debuted a new kind of sausage. It’s made out of a mixture of soy protein, steak flavoring…and processed sewage. The soy and steak flavor are supposed to cover up the taste of human waste. And in 2006, a team of food scientists at Japan’s International Medical Center announced that they had successfully developed a process to extract vanilla from cow dung. The scientists promised to use the flavoring only in nonfood items such as shampoo.

At an Ogori subway station in 2005, a blind couple gave their seeing eye dog a spoken command. It’s unknown what exactly they told the dog to do. The dog apparently misunderstood because after receiving the command, the dog jumped off the subway platform and onto the tracks below. The couple, still holding the leash, also plunged onto the tracks. They were all killed by an oncoming train. Sad irony: The couple was on their way to a dog-obedience course.

In 2004 a team from Rikkyo University discovered that at 16 aquariums and zoos around Japan, there were 20 same-sex penguin couples. Researchers believe it’s because penguins raised in captivity have difficulty finding suitable mates of the opposite sex because of the limited population.

Show business wasn’t always as highbrow as it is today. Before the dawn of sophisticated entertainments such as sitcoms, reality shows, and YouTube, stage performers could do almost any weird act…and people would pay to see it. Here are some well-known—and very strange—performers of yesteryear.

N
AME:
Clarence E. Willard

ACT:
“He grows before your eyes!”

STORY:
Willard was a vaudeville performer in the 1910s. Without the aid of any machinery, he would “grow” from 5'10" to 6'4" while delivering a monologue about his bizarre talent, or anecdotes about how he had horrified foreign heads of state with his act. Here’s how he did it: Willard would slowly stretch every muscle in his chest, throat, knees, and hips as far as they could go to give the impression that he was growing. Then, painfully, he would hold them like that for 12 minutes and then slowly “shrink” back to his normal size.

NAME:
Orville Stamm

ACT:
“Musical Muscleman”

STORY:
Stamm was a teenaged singer and fiddle player on the vaudeville circuit known as “The Strongest Boy in the World.” As he played the violin, a huge bulldog clamped down on and hung from his bowing arm. For the finale of his act, Stamm laid down on the stage face-up while a small upright piano was lowered onto his stomach. A pianist would then jump up and down on Stamm’s thighs while playing along to Stamm singing “Ireland Must Be Heaven ’Cause My Mother Came From There.”

NAME:
Matthew Buchinger

ACT:
“The One-Man Variety Show”

STORY:
This 17th-century German entertainer had a dazzling array of talents. He played 10 instruments (some of which he’d invented himself), sang, danced, read minds, was a trick-shot artist and marksman, bowled, did magic tricks, drew portraits and landscapes,
and did calligraphy. Even more impressive: Buchinger had no arms or legs. He had finlike appendages instead of hands, and “stood” only 28 inches tall.

NAME:
Datas

ACT:
“The Memory Man”

STORY:
Born W. J. M. Bottle, this early-1900s performer’s talent was simply knowing lots of facts. Bottle had left school at the age of 11 to earn money for his family. But he continued to learn, repeatedly reading whatever books and newspapers he could find until he had the contents committed to memory. For his act, he would ask the audience to submit about 50 questions and then answer them in rapid-fire succession, embellishing answers with extra information or droll humor. For instance, when asked “When was beef the highest?” Datas replied, “When the cow jumped over the moon.” After he died, Datas’s brain was autopsied. It weighed 69 ounces, the heaviest on record at the time.