Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (16 page)

• If you’re having nightmares involving a dead person, sew some of your hair into an old shoe and then give the shoe to a beggar. That will keep the dead person’s spirit away from you. (No word on what happens to the beggar.)

• If a woman wants to win the heart of the young man she desires, she must steal a strand of his hair and mix it with dirt taken from one of the young man’s footsteps. Then she must burn both to powder and somehow trick the young man into eating the ashes.

• For a woman to obtain
complete
mastery over a man, more-drastic steps are necessary. She must strip naked and sneak into his room while he’s asleep. If she can snip off a lock of his hair and retreat from the room without awakening him, he will be under her spell. The woman must wear the lock of hair on her person, perhaps in a small bag or in a ring. One caveat: If the man catches her with it, the spell will turn against her.

• If a woman who wants children is having trouble conceiving, she should eat grass growing atop the grave of a woman who died during pregnancy. Another solution: the husband should poke a tiny hole in each end of a raw egg and then blow the contents into his wife’s mouth, and she must eat them.

• How to tell if you’re pregnant: Take an axe or a hammer to a place where two roads cross, and stand there nine nights in a row. On the ninth night, pee on the implement and bury it there. Wait nine days and then dig it up again. If the implement is rusty, you’re pregnant.

• To ensure that her children are healthy and strong, the expectant mother must wear a necklace made of bear claws and children’s teeth. Avoid eating fish and snails during pregnancy; otherwise, the child will be as stupid as a fish and as slow as a snail.

• Avoid cemeteries during pregnancy. If the shadow of a cross on a grave falls on a pregnant woman, she will have a miscarriage.

(Note: The wishes of any naughty gypsy who “anticipated the privileges of matrimony” notwithstanding, this is not an effective means of contraception.)

• If your child is born during the light of the full moon, it will go on to have a happy marriage.

• If you are the victim of a burglary or a robbery, buy a black hen and fast with the hen for nine Fridays in a row. If the thief does not return your property, he will die.

• Avoid dustdevils and whirlwinds. They are signs that the devil is dancing with a witch, and if you approach too close you can be carried away, body and soul, straight to the depths of hell.

• If your cow wanders away and gets lost, jam a pair of scissors into the crossbeam running across the living room ceiling, if it has one. This will protect the cow from witches.

• If a cow “makes water” (pees) while being milked, she is bewitched.

• It is bad luck to meet up with a priest or a nun, especially if they’re the first person you meet in the morning. Conversely, it is very lucky to meet with a woman “of easy virtue—the easier, the better.”

Where It Originated:
Seward, Alaska

How You Do It:
Called MUni for short, mountain unicycling was invented in the mid-1980s by a local judge named George Peck, who customized his unicycle with a bigger tire. A mountain unicycle can go anywhere a mountain bike can, but it’s much safer because it can turn sharp corners and its “direct drive” prevents you from coasting down steep hills at high speeds. Still, competitive MUni riders fall frequently and are required to wear helmets at tournaments, which take place in North America, Europe, and Australia. Carefully maneuvering a unicycle down a mountainside, Peck explains, is “not exactly exhilarating…but it is a series of little joys.”

Millions of babies are born every day, but only a select few of these births are weird enough to make it into a
Bathroom Reader.

S
TRINGS ATTACHED
In December 2006, Sharon Taylor was rushing into the hospital in West Yorkshire, England—she could feel her baby coming and wasn’t sure she could “hold it” until she reached the delivery room. She couldn’t. Once inside the doors, the newborn “shot out” of Taylor so fast that her boyfriend tried to catch it. He couldn’t. According to reports, baby Ashleigh landed on the floor and skidded a few feet, but then—thanks to the umbilical cord—was retracted right back up into her mommy’s arms.

While playing the slot machines at an Atlantic City, New Jersey, casino, Nyree Thompson started going into labor, even though her baby wasn’t due for another month. She alerted a security guard, but he didn’t believe her…until her water broke. With Thompson lying on the floor of the crowded casino, a guard yelled, “Don’t push!” Thompson replied, “Forget you! This baby is coming right now!” And she was right. The baby boy, who she named Qualeem, was wrapped up in a casino jacket and placed in his mother’s arms. Casino spokesman Steve Callender told reporters, “We’ve had people die here, but this is the first time we’ve had people born here.”

At 3 a.m. on a March night in 2007, Lisa Tauer, a 28-year-old retail manager from Hurley, Wisconsin, started feeling contractions. They were only 10 minutes apart, so she and her husband Jereme
thought
they had plenty of time. But as their Dodge Neon sped down Highway 2, the contractions got much closer. “You need to get us there, like now!” Lisa said from the passenger seat. As the speedometer wavered between 90 and 100 mph on the empty highway, Jereme turned on the interior light and saw his baby boy’s head crowning. “So he was holding onto the head, while I was trying to push,” recalled Lisa. She was scooted so far back on the reclined seat that
Jereme Jr. landed right on the seat cushion. Jereme Sr. recalled, “I just kind of cradled him as he came out, and watched him, watched the road, watched him, watched the road.” Shortly after, the couple found a police car that escorted them to the hospital, where Jereme Jr. was reported to be in excellent condition.

Due to a genetic bone disorder, 33-year-old Stacey Herald is only 2'4" tall. “My whole life, I’ve been told that I wasn’t able to have children, that the baby would grow up underneath my lungs and smother out my heart, and we would both die. Something inside me just didn’t believe that.” So Stacey and her husband Wil convinced their doctor to let her try. First, the couple had Katira, born with the same small stature as her mother. But when Stacey became pregnant again, there were no signs of the defect; it was going to be the size of a regular baby, growing inside the frame of a very small woman. “If I laid down, I looked like a snail. That’s how big my belly was. I looked like an Idaho potato with arms and legs. I couldn’t see my feet.” In February 2008, baby Makaia, measuring 18 inches, was born successfully to Stacey, who measures 28 inches. (To put it in perspective, it’s equivalent to a 5'8" woman giving birth to a 4' baby.)

As floodwaters raged through Mozambique in 2000, 23-year-old expectant mother Cecilia Chirindza and her family took refuge on a makeshift platform in the top of a tree for three days. There was no sign of rescue…and Cecilia went into labor. Only an hour after baby Rositha was born, a military helicopter arrived. As news cameras rolled, a rescuer lowered himself down and cut the baby’s umbilical cord before pulling the family to safety one by one. The footage made Cecilia and Rositha the faces of the disaster.

Four months later, mother and child were flown around the world as part of an appeal for aid to the poor country still reeling from the floods that left two million people homeless. Cecilia told reporters she hoped the attention would not only help her people, but also give her child an opportunity to one day become a “great leader.”

Uncle John has mentioned Elvis Presley in 21 consecutive
Bathroom Readers
. Here are some more notable streaks
.

•
Most Consecutive Academy Award Nominations:
Walt Disney was nominated for Best Animated Short Subject every year from 1942 to 1963—a span of 22 years. He won four times.

•
Most Consecutive Seasons Without Winning a World Series:
The Chicago Cubs hold baseball’s longest futility streak—100 seasons without a championship (and counting).

•
Most Consecutive Emmy nominations Without a Win:
Susan Lucci was nominated for a Daytime Emmy for her role as Erica Kane on
All My Children
13 years in a row, from 1981 to 1993. On her 19th (nonconsecutive) nomination in 1999, she finally won.

•
Most Consecutive Razzie Award Nominations:
The Razzies are the Oscars of bad movies. Sylvester Stallone was nominated for Worst Actor 13 years in a row (1985–1997). He won five times.

•
Most Consecutive #1 Songs by a Single Artist:
From 1985 to 1988, Whitney Houston had seven straight singles reach #1. They were: “Saving All My Love for You,” “How Will I Know,” “Greatest Love of All,” “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” “Didn’t We Almost Have It All,” “So Emotional,” and “Where Do Broken Hearts Go.”

•
Most Consecutive Nominations for U.S. President:
Eugene Debs was the Socialist candidate in 1900, 1904, 1908, and 1912. (How’d he do? Have you ever heard of President Eugene Debs?)

•
Most Consecutive Games Started in the NFL
: Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre started 253 straight games from 1992 to 2008. His closest rival is the Colts’ Peyton Manning, with 160 consecutive starts over nine years.

•
Most Consecutive Blockbuster Movies:
Tom Hanks starred in 10 consecutive movies that made more than $100 million at
the box office. They were
Forrest Gump, Apollo 13, Toy Story
(voice only)
, Saving Private Ryan, You’ve Got Mail, Toy Story 2
(voice only)
, The Green Mile, Cast Away, Road to Perdition
, and
Catch Me If You Can
.

•
Most Consecutive Postseason Bowl Game Appearances:
The University of Michigan football team (the Wolverines) has played for 32 straight seasons.

•
Most Consecutive Years of Drought:
Geologists have determined that in the “four corners” region of the United States (where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah meet), there was no rainfall between 1276 and 1299, making that 23-year period the longest drought in “American” history.

•
Most Consecutive “Most Points Scored” Titles in the NBA
: Michael Jordan scored more points than anyone else for 10 consecutive seasons (not including a two-year hiatus to play baseball), from 1987 to 1998. The streak ended when he retired.

•
Most Consecutive Years in Primetime:
Gunsmoke
aired first-run shows on television for 20 years straight, from 1955 to 1975.

•
Most Consecutive Sellouts:
The Portland Trail Blazers of the NBA sold out 814 straight home games between 1976 and 1996.

•
Most Consecutive Years With a Hit Song:
Each year from 1970 to 2000, Elton John charted at least one single on the Billboard Hot 100—a period of 31 years. (The first: “Border Song.” The last: “Someday Out of the Blue.”)

•
Most Consecutive Sports Broadcasts:
Chick Hearn started calling Los Angeles Lakers basketball games on the radio in 1961. Between November 1965 and December 2001, he never missed a single game. Grand total: 3,338 games.

•
Most Consecutive Emmy Award Wins:
The Oustanding Reality-Competition Series award was created in 2002. As of 2007, the only program to ever win the award—a total of five times—is
The Amazing Race
.

This classic style of pun was originally invented in the 1920s. They’re atrocious and corny…so of course we couldn’t resist them
.