Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (36 page)

Mann was born in 1952 and, like Mike Hoare, was a former British military officer. He became involved in Executive Outcomes in the 1990s, then started his own mercenary outfit, called Sandline International, in 1996. Sandline mostly fought rebel groups in African countries, but became well known internationally when an attempt to put down a rebellion in Papua New Guinea—for which Sandline charged $36 million—went awry and led to the toppling of the nation’s government. Things went awry again in 2004 when Mann and 69 mercenary troops attempted to take over Equatorial Guinea in Central Africa. At the behest of a group supporting exiled ex-president Severo Moto, they were arrested on the way there—in Zimbabwe—and after years of legal wrangling, Mann was sentenced to 34 years in prison in Equatorial Guinea. Mann claimed the coup was planned and financed by a reclusive London oil tycoon (Equatorial Guinea has
a lot
of oil) named Ely Calil. Mann said the goal of the operation was to install exiled opposition leader Severo Moto, who was living in Madrid, as president. Calil admitted involvement, but said he thought Mann and his mercenaries were simply going to provide Moto with security for a trip to Equatorial Guinea. Calil was never charged with a crime. Mann also named Mark Thatcher, son of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, as a financier and member of the “management team” of the coup plot. In 2005 Thatcher pleaded guilty to being “unwittingly” involved, and was fined $500,000 and given a four-year prison sentence (suspended).

ACTUAL NEWS ITEM

“An Australian Army vehicle worth $74,000 has gone missing after being painted with camouflage.”

Proof that truth
is
stranger than fiction
.

S
EX, VIOLENCE, BUTTER PECAN
Leon Kass is President George W. Bush’s Morals and Ethics advisor. In 1994 he published an essay about what he believed to be the worst moral menace threatening human dignity today: ice cream. “Licking an ice cream cone,” Kass wrote, “is a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America, but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive.”

Eija-Riitta Eklöf of Sweden saw film footage of the Berlin Wall on TV when she was a child. It began a lifelong love affair that, in 1979, culminated in “marriage.” Eklöf threw a wedding ceremony at the Wall in front of a group of friends and changed her last name to Berliner-Mauer (“Berlin wall” in German). She claims to have had a loving (and physical) relationship with the Wall until it was torn down in 1989 (in what Berliner-Mauer calls “frenzied attacks by a mob”). Now, after two decades of widowhood, Berliner-Mauer says she’s still not ready to begin dating again. “The Great Wall of China is attractive, but he’s too thick,” she told a London newspaper. “My husband was sexier.”

In 2008 German medical student Janine Bauer took her year-old son to the zoo in the city of Halle. While looking at the tigers, Bauer noticed that one of the baby tigers was choking on a piece of meat. Zookeepers came to the aid of the tiger and got the meat out of its throat, but it still passed out. So Bauer, a medical student, offered to help. She performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and chest compressions, and after about four minutes, the tiger regained consciousness. The grateful zoo named the tiger Johann, after Bauer’s son.

LAND SHARK

Sam Hawthorne, a 14-year-old from Dudley, England, was attacked by a small shark in 2008. His mother saved him—she heard the boy’s screams and pried the shark, which had clamped down on his cheek, off her blood-covered son. Hawthorne escaped with just a small scar. The weird part: The shark had been dead for years and was mounted on a wall in Sam’s bedroom. While sleepwalking, he ran into it and knocked it off the wall. Its teeth dug into his cheek for 15 minutes before he woke up.

In December 2007, authorities in Sarasota, Florida, responded to a call about a suspicious package found under a stairwell in a parking garage. Police closed off several blocks and called in the bomb squad, who prepared to detonate the device. At the last moment they realized that the strange-looking contraption wasn’t a bomb—it was an old-fashioned manual typewriter.

In professional sports, players sign contracts and basically become the property of their team. When they’re traded, it’s generally done in exchange for other players, money, or draft picks. But not always. At the beginning of the 2008 baseball season, pitcher John Odom was traded from the minor league Calgary Vipers to the Laredo Broncos. In exchange for Odom, the Vipers got 10 baseball bats, worth about $650. (Odom reports that umpires, players, and coaches now relentlessly call him “Batman.”) It’s not the first odd deal the Vipers have made. While renovating their stadium in 2004, the team traded a pitcher for 1,500 new seats.

A 35-year-old man was walking to his car in a parking lot in Guelph, Ontario, when he suddenly felt a sharp pain in his leg. He went to the hospital, where doctors discovered a bullet wound. But the man had been alone and hadn’t heard any shots, so where’d the bullet come from? Police believe a man taking target practice on his property in Waterloo, more than a mile away from Guelph, was the culprit. The stray bullet had traveled through “several acres and a tree-lined area” en route to the unlucky victim.

And a few other odd ways people try to lose those extra pounds they’ve been lugging around
.

N
AME
: The Original Grapefruit Diet
BACKGROUND
: The granddaddy of modern fad diets, it was known as the Hollywood Diet when it first caught on back in the 1930s. How’d it work? Through the supposed fat-burning power of the enzymes in grapefruit.

DESCRIPTION
: Breakfast was half a grapefruit and tea or coffee. Coffee drinking was encouraged, probably to pep up the food-deprived dieter, who was allowed very few calories—only 800 per day in some versions of the diet (the typical person eats about 2,000 calories per day). Every lunch and dinner started with half a grapefruit and ended with either coffee or tea. The rest of lunch might be two eggs, a tomato salad with vinegar and herbs (no oil), and a piece of melba toast. Dinner, after the grapefruit, might be six ounces of chicken or lean meat and half a head of lettuce with a tomato. The diet lasted for 12 days. Strangely, the rapid weight loss caused by the diet was attributed to the magic of grapefruit…rather than to the lack of food.

NAME
: The Cabbage Soup Diet

BACKGROUND
: The exact origin of this fad diet is unknown, but it became popular in the 1980s when it was passed around via fax machines (much like similar e-mail fads today).

DESCRIPTION
: A seven-day diet (and it’s so boring that seven days is probably all anyone could stand). It consists of homemade cabbage soup—as much of it as you like on any day of the diet. There are numerous recipes in circulation, but here’s the basic one: cabbage (and other fresh vegetables), canned tomatoes, onion soup mix, and V8 juice. On Day 1 you eat cabbage soup, plus any fruit except bananas. Day 2: same soup, vegetables (no bananas), baked potato with butter. Day 3: more soup, fruits and vegetables (no potatoes, no bananas). Day 4: still more soup, as many as six bananas, fat-free milk. Well, you get the idea. The obvious drawback of the cabbage diet: flatulence.

NAME
: The Caveman Diet

BACKGROUND
: Also called the Stone Age Diet, the Paleolithic Diet, or the Hunter-Gatherer Diet. Proponents are a little vague about the actual time frame to which it refers, but the idea is that cavemen were thin and healthy from eating the animals and plants they hunted and gathered. So if we emulate their diet, we’ll avoid modern illnesses like heart disease and diabetes.

DESCRIPTION
: Lean meats, eggs, and seafood are a big part of the Caveman Diet, as are raw fruits and vegetables (although you’re allowed to cook the vegetables). But you can’t have any grains (or grain products, like pasta), legumes, potatoes, dairy products, yeast, vinegar, sugar, salt. Good news for Neanderthals: Some paleo diets allow diet soda, coffee, wine, and beer. (Yee-ha!)

NAME
: The Cookie Diet

BACKGROUND
: The 1975 brainchild of Dr. Sanford Siegal, the Cookie Diet
sounds
as if you’re going to get to eat cookies—and you are…but not just any cookies.

DESCRIPTION
: You eat six of Dr. Siegal’s special cookies—“made under his personal supervision in his private bakery”—followed by a high-protein, low-carb dinner of six ounces of meat or fish and one cup of green vegetables. That’s it for the day, a total of about 800 calories. The cookies, with a “secret protein blend” that supposedly suppresses hunger, come in five flavors: chocolate, oatmeal raisin, coconut, blueberry, and banana. The Cookie Diet made big news when Madonna complained that while her husband Guy Ritchie was on the diet he lost interest in sex.

NAME
: Tapeworm Diet Pills

BACKGROUND
: This one almost lands in the “urban legend” category. But it’s true, and it goes back to the craze for quack-diets between 1900 and 1920.

DESCRIPTION
: The pills contained live tapeworms, which, according to the plan, would infest your gut (just as they do when dogs get them) and mess with your intestines, making you lose weight. There are a number of problems: Tapeworm infestation causes, among other things, abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhea, flatulence, nausea…and pieces of worm passing through your system. (Ewww!)

Here’s the second installment of our story on one of the most famous mining strikes in American history. (Part I is on page 47.)

G
ET A LODE OF THIS
When you’re pulling gold out of the earth by the pound, word of what you’re doing has a way of getting out. In June 1850, a rancher named B. A. Harrison, living in Truckee Meadows, about 10 miles away from the Comstock mine, learned of the strike and went to see it for himself. He collected some samples and brought them to the town of Grass Valley, where he gave pieces to friends. One of them, a local judge (and a miner) named James Walsh, had the ore “assayed,” or analyzed, to see what was in it and how much it was worth.

The assayer estimated that an average ton of the ore would yield about $969 worth of gold. No surprise there; Harrison and Walsh knew there was plenty of gold in the ore. But what really stunned everybody—including the assayer, who was so incredulous that he tested the ore a second time—was that each ton would also yield nearly $3,000 worth of
silver
.

Silver? What silver? The assayer explained to Harrison and Walsh that the blue dirt that had proved so frustrating to the prospectors was actually
silver sulfide
, or silver ore, and a very rich deposit of it at that. It was, according to the experts, “an almost solid mass of silver.” As Harrison had seen with his own eyes, the exasperated prospectors had already dug up tons and tons of the blue ore and were dumping it in huge waste piles all over the place. They had absolutely no idea what they had stumbled onto.

SHHH
!

That night, Harrison, Walsh, and a few other associates made plans to sneak out of town the following morning without attracting attention, so that they could stake their own claims next to the existing ones and maybe even buy out the original claims if
they could. But who could keep that big a secret? If you won the lottery on Monday evening, could you really keep it to yourself until Tuesday morning? At least one person must have talked, because by the time the men were ready to leave the following morning, Grass Valley was buzzing with news of the discovery.

It took just days for word of the strike to spread from Grass Valley to the California gold country. Soon miners who’d been unlucky there began abandoning their existing claims and heading east. But the real rush didn’t begin until after Judge Walsh had shipped nearly 40 tons of the ore to San Francisco in fall of 1859, where it yielded more than $118,000 worth of gold and silver.