Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd (36 page)

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Elvis Presley’s love of belly-busting fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches is well known—he once ate nothing but them for two months. Here’s the recipe for another one of the King’s favorite recipes: Ugly Steak.

Rub a one-pound top sirloin steak with garlic and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Completely cover the steak in flour and fry in a pan filled with oil deep enough to cover the steak. Fry until both sides are brown and the steak is well done. Now, pour out all but about 3 tablespoons of the used cooking oil. Add 3 cups of water and mix thoroughly with all the cooked brown bits and gristle in the bottom of the pan. Boil until you get a thick paste. Add salt and pepper and drizzle over buttered mashed potatoes. Serve with a can of peas simmered in butter. (The King’s favorite beverage complement: a quart of buttermilk.)

Maybe there’s more to voodoo curses than we think…

C
URSES

In November 2006, President George W. Bush made a brief stop in Jakarta for a meeting with Indonesian President Susilo Yudhoyono. At the same exact time, an Indonesian man was slitting the throats of a goat and a snake and stabbing a crow in the chest so he could mix their blood together—with some spices and broccoli—and then drink the concoction. And whatever he couldn’t drink, he smeared on his face.

Ki Gendeng Pamungkas, a well-known “Black Magic” practitioner in Jakarta, was performing what he said was a Voodoo ritual to curse the president and his Secret Service contingent. The ritual, he said, would put Secret Service agents into a trance, making them believe they were under attack, which would lead to chaos. As for President Bush: “My curse will make him bloat like broccoli,” he said. He added that it was sure to work, because “the devil is with me today.”

While the president never complained (publicly) of any intestinal trouble during his trip, shortly after the curse several strange incidents occurred. Voodoo or coincidence? You be the judge.

• Just hours before arriving in Jakarta, the auto-brake on Air Force One malfunctioned and six tires blew out as the plane was landing in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (nobody was hurt).

• The next day, the presidential contingent traveled to Hawaii, where the president’s travel director, Greg Pitts, 25, was mugged and beaten after leaving a nightclub in Waikiki. Newspaper reports said he was “too drunk” to describe the suspects to police.

• And across the globe, presidential daughter Barbara Bush had her purse stolen from her table at a restaurant in Argentina…right under the noses of her Secret Service guards. (The night before, another agent was involved in an altercation after a night out. Secret Service officials said it was a “mugging.”)

Just when you think everything that could possibly be invented has already been invented, along comes something like rejection-letter toilet paper.

T
RUTH IN ADVERTISING

Say, what’s that suspicious looking device? It’s the “Suspicious Looking Device!” A darkly humorous response to the increased fears of terrorism in recent years, the SLD is a red metal box with dotted lights, a small screen, a buzzer, and whirring motor. What does it do? Nothing. It’s just supposed to
appear
suspicious.

A company called Life Technology Research International has created the seemingly impossible: a magical wishing machine. You simply speak into the microphone on the Psychotronic Wishing Machine to tell it what you want…then sit back and wait a few days for your wish to come true. Just make sure the machine is on—LTRI says that the wish is far less likely to ever come true if the machine is turned off while the wish is still being “processed.” Nevertheless, results are still
not
guaranteed. How does it work? “Conscious human interaction and energy fields.” Cost: $499.

For the cat owner who has everything: A California man has invented the Purr Detector. It’s a small motion detector and light embedded inside a cat collar. Whenever the cat purrs, the collar glows. It’s only available by mail order, so if you need to know if your cat is purring before the Purr Detector arrives, you can always use your ears.

The gross-out game show
Fear Factor
is no longer on the air, but it’s still going strong with a line of candy based on its most memorable segment: people eating disgusting animal parts. There are lollipops in the shape of a chicken’s foot, pig’s snout, and cow’s heart (flavored lemon, bubblegum, and cinnamon, respectively)
as well as candy sheep eyeballs (mango) and “coagulated blood balls” (mmm…cherry!).

Many toddlers resist potty training because they’re afraid of the toilet. The white porcelain behemoth is supposed to look a lot less imposing with Toilet Buddies: brightly-colored animal stickers that affix to the toilet, making it look kid-friendly enough for the little ones to use it. They’re available in Poo P. Bunny, Puddles Puppy, and Ca Ca Cow.

Most successful writers had a period of frequent rejection letters from publishers (even Uncle John). Now, jilted authors can hap pily take out their revenge on those who have denied them literary glory with Rejection Letter Toilet Paper. You go to the Web site of a company called Lulu, upload the text of a rejection letter, and the company prints it onto four rolls of toilet paper for you.

A few years ago, friends of Canadian artist Rob Sacchetto asked him to draw pictures of them as zombies to use as decorations for a Halloween party. Now Sacchetto runs a business selling Zombie Portraits. For $80, Sacchetto takes a photograph of you and uses it as the basis for a hand-drawn caricature of you as a zombie, complete with rotting flesh, oozing brains, and sagging eyeballs.

Sarah Witmer had a tradition with her grandchildren: Whenever they lost a tooth, they’d put it under their pillow and the “tooth fairy” (Witmer) took it away. But this tooth fairy was a little different: A couple of days later, the kid would get a small sculpture of a castle made out of sand and the ground-up tooth. Now Witmer makes “Fairy Tooth Castles” professionally. When
your
child loses a tooth, you can send it to Witmer. She’ll grind it up, mix it with sand and a hardening agent, sculpt a nine-inch-tall castle out of it, and send it back to you.

Here’s a look at one of the strangest crime waves in American history—one that terrorized even the toughest characters in town—as city officials, the police, and even the public looked the other way.

O
UT TO SEA

One evening in the early 1900s, 19-year-old Max DeVeer and a friend were living it up in a San Francisco honky tonk called the Barbary Coast. There they met a man who asked them if they’d like to meet some girls.

“Well, naturally at that age we were raring to go anywhere—females were few and far between,” DeVeer told an interviewer half a century later. On the promise of meeting women, he and his friend went to the man’s room, where he served them drinks.

“That was the last that I remember,” DeVeer said. “The results of it was we woke up on a three-mast ship going through the Golden Gate....Besides my partner and myself, there were three other guys. One of them was a city fireman, and one was a store clerk and the other one was a wino, I guess.”

DeVeer and company had all been “shanghaied”—drugged, kidnapped, and sold for as little as $50 a head to the captain of a sailing ship headed for the high seas. When they might make it back to San Francisco was anyone’s guess; people who had been shanghaied might remain at sea, working as little more than slaves, for years at a time.

DeVeer’s experience wasn’t unique. For more than half a century it had been a common practice in San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and other West Coast ports for men known as “crimps” to shanghai thousands of men every year. Shanghai, China, was a distant port of call, so when someone of seafaring age disappeared from city streets without a trace, people said they’d been “sent to Shanghai” or “shanghaied.”

Two events led to the heyday of shanghaiing in the late 1840s. The first was the invention of the clipper ship, a sleek and very fast sailing ship that got its speed from more than 30 sails that
were mounted on three giant masts. Lots of sails required lots of sailors to manage them, which increased the demand for sailors.

The second was the California gold rush of 1849, which caused men to abandon the low-paying, dangerous life of a sailor to seek their fortune as “Forty-Niners.” There were always plenty of sailors willing to go
to
San Francisco; the problem was that as soon as a ship dropped anchor in San Francisco Bay, the crew abandoned ship and headed for the gold fields. By the end of 1849 more than 700 abandoned ships lay at anchor in the bay in need of crews to sail them back out again.

For San Francisco’s merchants and city fathers, the situation was intolerable. If the city was going to grow, the port had to function normally—San Franciscans had to be able to import the supplies they needed and export the goods they produced, and ship owners had to feel confident that if they sent a ship to San Francisco, they’d eventually get it back again. So when ship captains began offering $50 per head to anyone who could find them sailors to get their ships back out of port, crimps with colorful nicknames like Scab Johnny, Chloroform Kate and the Shanghai Chicken set to work meeting the demand. Business leaders, City Hall, and even the police turned a blind eye.

Shanghaiing was a common practice in just about every port city on the West Coast. But San Francisco’s reputation paled in comparison to Portland, Oregon, which was known as the “Unheavenly City,” the “Forbidden City,” and “The Worst Port in the World.” If the sophistication of the city’s shanghai network was any measure, the nicknames were well deserved.

Portland’s waterfront was one of the seediest parts of town. The neighborhood was filled with saloons, pool halls, brothels, and even opium dens that served not only sailors on shore leave, but also any loggers, ranch hands, river workers, and other laborers who might be in town looking for a good time. Even when these establishments weren’t owned outright by crimp gangs, they were usually in cahoots with them.

Some business owners trapped their victims just by letting nature take its course—when a customer passed out drunk in a bar or became incapacitated in an opium den, the saloon keeper left
them to the mercy of the crimp gangs. If two drunks got in a bar fight, the crimps waited for it to end and then dragged away the loser. (If the winner got enough of a beating, they’d drag him away, too.)

Other proprietors took a more active approach: They served up punches made of beer mixed with schnapps and laced with laudanum or other drugs, or gave their customers “Shanghai smokes”—cigars laced with opium. Some businesses even had trap doors in the floor that sent unsuspecting victims plunging to the cellar, into the arms of waiting crimps. In Portland alone, 1,500 people were shanghaied in a typical year. In the busiest years the number climbed as high as 3,000—more than eight victims a day.

Nearly everyone who was shanghaied in Portland ended up in a cellar below street level. In the neighborhoods near the waterfront, all the buildings’ cellars were connected to a network of tunnels and alleyways that ran all the way to the water’s edge. This elaborate maze of underground passages, infamously known as the “Shanghai Tunnels,” are what set Portland apart from other West Coast cities.

In other towns crimp gangs only shanghaied sailors as the need arose. If a ship pulled into port and the captain let it be known that he needed seven men to fill out his crew, the crimp gangs went out and kidnapped seven men. But Portland’s crimp gangs outfitted the Shanghai Tunnels with makeshift prison cells, which allowed the gangs to kidnap people, then hold them captive underground for weeks at a time. Then, when a ship needing men sailed into port, the crimp gangs were ready. They slipped drugs into their victims’ food and dragged them through the tunnels to the waiting ship. By the time the drugs wore off, the victims were out to sea with no hope of escape. They had only two choices: work or get thrown overboard.

Some captains paid their shanghaied sailors nothing; others paid a nominal wage but then charged the victims for their food and necessities and even deducted the crimp gang’s kidnapping fee from their pay. Either way the result was the same: After everything was totaled up, the sailors were essentially working for free.