Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd (38 page)

The American Psychiatric Association refuses to make an official comment on the merits of past-life regression, and believes that reincarnation is a religious matter. But some in the medical community believe that Laird is a sick woman and that Finkelstein is making matters worse by enabling her. Bethany Marshall, a psychologist who often appears on cable TV news shows, claims Laird suffers from a “delusional disorder.” Laird quickly brushes these comments off. “Ask my friends—I’m quite normal. This is not a delusional thing; it’s spiritual.”

• One of today’s leading “medium channelers,” Kevin Ryerson, has announced to the spiritual community that after reviewing Finkelstein’s video tapes, and then channeling a 3,000-year-old Egyptian spirit known as Ahtun-Re, that the Egyptian god has confirmed that “Sherrie Lea Laird—and only Laird—is the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe.”

• The astrology association Star IQ also conducted an investigation. Michael WolfStar, one of their premier astrologers, released their findings. “Marilyn’s Pluto and North Node are conjunct, while Sherrie Lea’s Sun and North Node are conjunct, and all four are found together in the middle of Cancer. It’s as if Marilyn’s death (Pluto) gave rise to Sherrie Lea’s personal identity (Sun).” (We’re not sure what this means, either.)

Through all of the hoopla (and her 15 minutes of fame), Laird maintains that the reincarnation is real, and something she never asked for. Feeling Marilyn Monroe’s deep sadness all of her life, she says, has taken its toll on her. So why the appearances on talk shows? “It’s just a case to bring more attention to reincarnation,” she said on the gossip show
Showbiz Tonight
. “The message is so much bigger than Marilyn Monroe. She was just a woman.”

*       *       *

• In 2006, 23-year-old Yarislav Ernst of Glivich, Poland, found out he had a malignant tumor on his tongue. He had a large section of it removed by doctors who then replaced it with tissue from another part of his body. “We removed the tumor and made sure that no malignant cells remained,” said Dr. Stanislav Poltorek, the chief oncological surgeon. “Then we collected skin, fat and nerve tissue from his buttocks and put it all together to form a new tongue, which we later sewed into his mouth.” The butt-tongue, he said, was working fine.

• In August 2003, Valdemar Lopes de Moraes of Monte Claros, Brazil, walked into a medical clinic to get treated for an earache. A few hours later he walked out—with a vasectomy. What happened? The nurses called
Aldemar
(for a vasectomy), and
Valdemar
thought he’d been called. “The strangest thing,” said the clinic manager, “is that he asked no questions when the doctor started preparations in the area which had so little to do with his ear. He later explained that he thought it was an ear inflammation that got down to his testicles.”

Home of the free, land of the strange.

N
O THANKS, I’LL GET IT MYSELF

In 2006, 3-year-old Robert Moore of Antigo, Wisconsin, spotted a Spongebob SquarePants doll in a grocery store’s “claw” style vending machine. His grandmother, Fredricka Bierdemann, gave him a dollar to try to get the toy, but he failed. She turned her back to Robert, fishing through her purse for another dollar and when she turned back around, he was gone. Then she spotted him: He was inside the vending machine, surrounded by stuffed animals. He’d reached an arm through the bottom of the machine and then managed to crawl all the way in. The fire department got him out. “He was having a ball in there, hugging all the stuffed animals,” Bierdemann said. “But I was shaking like a leaf.”

Panera Bread, a sandwich store in the White City Shopping Center in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, has a clause in its lease that forbids the mall from renting to another sandwich shop. When Qdoba Mexican Grill opened in the mall, Panera tried to stop them, saying that Qdoba’s most popular menu item—burritos—are actually sandwiches because they are made of bread (a tortilla) and filling (meat and beans). The dispute went to court. After testimony from a federal agriculture official and a professional chef, Qdoba won, with the judge ruling that a burrito is a burrito, and not a sandwich.

John Wilkinson and Charlotte Law, who call themselves “Umada” and “Yunyun,” lobbied the United Nations to recognize their faith as an official religion. Their faith: Jedi, based on the
Star Wars
movies. According to Wilkinson and Law, more than half a million people in English-speaking countries identify themselves as Jedi Knights. “Like the U.N., we are peacekeepers and we feel we have the basic right to be recognized by the national and international community.” The two also want the U.N. to rename the International Day for Tolerance to Interstellar Day of Tolerance.

Bill Lacovara of Ventnor, New Jersey, was fishing with his son near Atlantic City in 2006, when a plastic shopping bag floated by. Lacorva retrieved it. Inside he found several brown-paper wrapped packages containing more than 300 unopened letters to Reverend Grady Cooper, a Jersey City minister who died in 2004. The letters were prayer requests, ranging from the humorous (a man who wanted to win the lottery twice) to the sad (an unwed mother asking God to make her child’s father marry her). The letters date as far back as 1973. Who dumped them is a mystery, but Lacorva told reporters that he plans to sell them on eBay.

On Thanksgiving in 2006, Sandy and Bill Cobbs were cooking their holiday meal in their Bloomington, Minnesota, home. Suddenly, they heard the sound of smashing glass coming from the dining room. A wild turkey had broken in. It tore around the house, ultimately causing $10,000 in damage to the carpet, windows, and walls. Strangely, the same thing had happened to the Cobbs on Christmas two years earlier. They’d been at their daughter’s home across town when a neighbor called to tell them there was a giant hole in their dining room window—a turkey had run through it. “Everybody thinks it’s funny,” says Sandy Cobbs, “but it’s not.”

The Miami-Dade County Courthouse has established a Voodoo Squad. Its purpose: to clean up the leftovers from voodoo ceremonies. Florida has a large Caribbean population, many of whom believe voodoo rituals can influence a family member’s court case. The Voodoo Squad reports cleaning up sacrificed goats and chickens as well as corn kernels (said to speed up a trial), eggs (which collapse a case), and cakes (which make a judge more lenient).

In 1995, 37-year-old Peter Jonson of New York was shot in the head by a stray bullet from a gang dispute. He didn’t go to a hospital because he didn’t have insurance and feared having to pay off a massive medical bill. So he walked home, found a pair of pliers, and removed the bullet himself.

On page 19, we told you about the Japanese obsession with strange products known as
chindogu
. But those products are designed to be weird; these products are real. And really weird.

S
LIM MOUTH PIECE
. This product is designed to “work on flaccid facial muscles” to get “a firm mouth and a slim face line!” You hook a small plastic spring-loaded device

into either side of the mouth, and say “oh-oh-oh” and “e-e-e-e” to contract and release the spring. Then, according to the ads, “you can get beautiful and forever facial muscles!”

SMALL FACE IN THE BATH
. Called
Ofuro de Kogao
in Japanese, this item is for Japanese people striving for what is called the ideal face: a
chiisai kao
, or “small face.” It’s a rubber mask that you wear while bathing that will, supposedly, shrink your face.

PERSONAL KARAOKE.
It has earphones and a plastic cone that fits over your mouth so you can sing your favorite songs out loud without annoying people nearby.

SAUCE-DISPENSING CHOPSTICKS.
These hollow plastic chopsticks dispense your favorite condiment onto the food as you eat. You can fill them with soy sauce or whatever you choose and not have to worry about having to deal with that messy soy sauce bottle. (Except when you fill up the chopsticks.)

WATER SALAD.
It’s a salad-flavored soft drink made by Coca-Cola. Honest.

THE HEAD BATH CAP.
You know how you sometimes you want to take a bath, but not on your whole body—just on your head? Well, you’re in luck. Just fasten the Head Bath Cap around your head just above your eyes and give fill it up with warm water and enjoy a nice “head bath.” And, according to the ads, the water from the Head Bath Cap actually seeps into the pores in your scalp…stimulating hair growth!

Here’s the second installment of our story about a very odd college custom that—thankfully—has been gone a long, long time. (Part I is on page 93.)

G
OING PUBLIC

Photographing naked young
males
was never a problem in the 1940s: In those more innocent days, there was nothing particularly unseemly about a man photographing younger men in the buff. Young men were already used to the idea of stripping down in front of draft boards and athletic coaches; doing it again for William Sheldon wasn’t that big a deal. Sheldon was even able to publish hundreds of photos of Harvard freshmen in a book titled
The Atlas of Men,
which explained his theories about an inborn link between behavior and body types
.

If you come across a copy of
The Atlas of Men
in a library or used bookstore and flip through it looking for naked photographs of future celebrities and politicians, you might be disappointed: To his credit, Sheldon painted out the faces and the private parts to protect the privacy of his subjects and prevent the
Atlas
from being used for immoral purposes—you’d probably even have trouble recognizing a picture of yourself if one was in there.

What ultimately destroyed Sheldon’s career were his photographs of young
females
. In September 1950, he traveled to the University of Washington in Seattle to photograph students as part of his current project: amassing tens of thousands of photographs of women that could be used to create an
Atlas of Women
, a complementary volume to his
Atlas of Men.

Being photographed naked was a completely different experience for the young women than it was for the men. The women had never had to strip down to be examined by draft boards, and since few of them played sports, they had never had to undress in front of a coach, either. The closest many had ever come to disrobing for a stranger was during medical exams. But the family
doctor wasn’t really a stranger—and he didn’t take pictures, either.

One of the Washington coeds was so upset by the experience that she told her parents about it. Could she possibly have been the first young woman ever to complain? Were her parents the first ones to become enraged at Sheldon’s photos? Whatever it was, this time it made a difference: The following day the young woman, her parents, and their lawyers descended upon the University of Washington administration and raised such a fuss that school officials shut down Sheldon’s operation, seized the pictures he’d already taken, and burned them all.

Suddenly, something that had been accepted as an uncomfortable but unavoidable fact of college life came to be seen in a very different light. What was this man doing traveling around the country, taking nude pictures of young women fresh out of high school? As word of the brouhaha in Seattle spread, it began to knock sense into parents and colleges all over the country. One by one, schools began shutting their doors to Sheldon. He eventually had to scrap the
Atlas of Women
without finishing it.

Was the controversy surrounding his naked pictures enough to cast his scientific theories into disrepute? Or were his theories so loony that they failed on their own? Either way, Sheldon lived long enough to see his life’s work dismissed as nonsense and his professional reputation destroyed. He became an embarrassment to his profession, and spent his final years holed up alone in his home, where he passed the time by reading detective novels, one after another. He died in 1977 at the age of 78.

So what happened to all those photographs? When Sheldon died he still had more than 20,000 naked photos from Yale, Princeton, Mount Holyoke College, Vassar, Radcliffe, Smith, Swarthmore, the University of California, Syracuse, the University of Wisconsin, and many other colleges, plus pictures he took at the Oregon Hospital for the Criminally Insane. After his death his assistant, Roland Elderkin, tried to find a college that would take custody of the photographs, but none of them were interested—many had
already been shamed into destroying their own collections of posture photos and they weren’t about to be saddled with Sheldon’s. Finally in 1987, the National Anthropological Archives, part of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, agreed to accept Sheldon’s photos and papers.