Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (40 page)

• In 2000 Heather Perry of England suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome, of which the major symptom is…chronic fatigue. After doing some research, she decided that the only way to cure the condition was to relieve the pressure on her brain by drilling a dime-size hole in her skull. Doctors refused to do it, so Perry did it herself. She stood in front of a mirror, made an incision in her scalp, and drilled. There was no damage (although she was a few millimeters away from piercing her brain) and, according to Perry, her exhaustion is now gone.

• Peter Halvorson and William Lyons of Utah both received trepanning surgeries and touted the benefits of the cranial pressure-relieving procedure on the Internet. Despite the fact that neither man was a licensed physician, a British woman so believed in the surgery that in 2002 she hired them to drill a hole in her head and increase her “brain blood volume.” The patient survived, but Halvorson and Lyons were arrested and convicted of practicing medicine without a license. (They received three years probation.)

• In 1995 Jenny Gathorne-Hardy of London read an article about trepanning and was intrigued by the claim that a skull hole could enhance brain function by increasing blood flow. So she put a local anesthetic on the side of her head and drilled a hole. Gathorne-Hardy later told reporters that she feels “calmer, and that the mental exhaustion I became so used to has gone.”

• In the mid-1960s, English painter Joey Mellen wanted a hole drilled in his head, believing it would get him “permanently high.” His girlfriend, Amanda Feilding, had successfully trepanned herself (and experienced euphoric highs), but it took a bit more work to accomplish Mellen’s goal. Feilding unsuccessfully drilled his head once; the hole wasn’t deep enough. Then Feilding took over. She botched the second attempt and Mellen lost a lot of blood—enough to require medical attention. But that didn’t stop him. After recovering in a hospital (under psychiatric watch), Mellen went home and drilled the hole himself. When he heard what he later called “an ominous sounding ‘schlurp’ and the sound of bubbling,”—he knew he’d successfully bored through his skull (but
unsuccessfully
drilled into his own brain).

When people die—or even before—they don’t always give their money or assets to their friends and family. Sometimes, often through roundabout circumstances, it ends up in some very unlikely places
.

M
ARGARET WISE BROWN AND
GOODNIGHT MOON
Margaret Wise Brown wrote more than 100 children’s books. The most famous is
Goodnight Moon
, a bedtime story in which “goodnight” is said to all the objects in a room. It’s sold 11 million copies, making it one of the most popular children’s books ever. Brown died of an embolism while visiting France in 1952 at the age of 42. Her will gave all royalties from future sales of
Good-night Moon
(at the time, it had sold only about 3,000 copies) to Albert Clarke, a nine-year-old boy whose family lived in the apartment next-door to hers in New York City. Sales of the book slowly grew, and by the time Clarke got access to his inheritance at age 21, there was $75,000 waiting for him, which he blew on a new car and expensive clothes. His lawyer put him on a weekly allowance, but it was still enough to allow Clarke to wander around the United States, spending the money on drugs, cars, bad real estate deals, and legal fees (he was arrested dozens of times on various charges). Over the past 50 years, Clarke accumulated more than $5 million in royalties from the sales of
Goodnight Moon
. When a reporter tracked him down in 2000, he had only a few thousand dollars left.

At the time of Monroe’s death in 1962 at age 36, her estate was worth about $1.6 million. She willed it to the two people she trusted most: her acting teacher, Lee Strasberg (75 percent), and her psychiatrist, Dr. Marianne Kris (25 percent). When Kris died in 1980, her portion of the Monroe estate—which had grown substantially in the past two decades due to merchandising Monroe’s image and the enduring popularity of her movies—went to the Anna Freud Centre, a children’s psychiatric research hospital in London. It earns about $500,000 a year from the Monroe estate.

Ingvar Kamprad founded IKEA in Sweden in 1943 as a mail-order consumer goods business and began opening stores a few years later. Today, Kamprad is worth $30 billion. In 1982 he donated his ownership stake in the IKEA stores to a Dutch charity called the Stichting Ingka Foundation, which operates them through a for-profit subsidiary. With annual profits in the billions, the foundation is technically the world’s richest charity. Its goal is to “promote and support innovation in architectural and interior design,” but it distributes less than 1% of its earnings to colleges and other institutions…because it’s not really a charity. The Foundation is run by a five-member board, headed by Kamprad, who still makes millions of dollars each year because the Foundation only owns IKEA stores, not the IKEA trademark or concept (they’re still owned by Kamprad). Every IKEA store in the world pays Kamprad a franchise fee, totaling about $631 million a year. The whole system was set up so that IKEA was protected against a hostile takeover and so Kamprad could pay less in taxes. For example, in 2004 IKEA made a profit of 1.4 billion euros, but paid only 19 million euros in taxes.

In 1955 businessman John Cox acquired all the stock of the Yankee Stadium Holding Company, making him the sole owner of Yankee Stadium and allowing him to lease the stadium back to the team at a lucrative rate. Seven years later, Cox died, leaving Yankee Stadium to his alma mater, Rice University in Houston, Texas. In 1971 New York City invoked the right of eminent domain and forced the university to sell them Yankee Stadium for a $2.5 million “condemnation fee.” (The university had a partner: the land under the stadium was owned at the time by the Knights of Columbus. It had been sold to them by its previous owner, John Cox.)

In 1929, eight years before he died, Scottish writer J. M. Barrie gave the copyright to his most famous work—his original 1904 stage version of
Peter Pan—
to the Great Ormond Street Hospital. The millions in royalties they’ve earned since then on productions of the play have enabled the London institution to become England’s top children’s hospital.

We won’t be offended if you doze off while reading this page
.

• Studies show that 41 percent of people sleep in the fetal position, 28 percent on their side, 13 on their back, 7 on their stomach, and the rest in two or more positions.

• Mark Twain wrote most of
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
and
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
in bed. Another author who wrote in bed: Robert Louis Stevenson.

• 64 percent of women sleep on the left side of the bed.

• King Louis XI of France received visiting dignitaries in his bed, which he called the Bed of Justice. At one point, he owned 413 beds.

• Tip: The handles on the side of a mattress aren’t for moving it—that stretches it out. The handles are only supposed to be used to rotate or flip the mattress on the box springs.

• More than 600,000 Americans are injured by beds every year (mostly by falling out of them or bumping their heads on headboards).

• World record for making a bed: Wendy Wall of Sydney, Australia, made one in 28.2 seconds (1978).

• Queen and king-size beds weren’t available until the 1950s. The Simmons company invented them in 1958.

• Sleep experts say that people who sleep on their right side have better digestion.

• The word “mattress” comes from the Arabic
matrah
, for “where something is thrown.”

• Two adults sleeping in a double bed have less personal space than a baby in a crib.

• Sleep law: in Tallinn, Estonia, couples are not allowed to play chess in bed.

• 40 percent of men snore, and 30 percent of women do.

• Now
that’s
a king-sized bed: the Great Bed of Ware, built in the 1590s in the town of Ware, England. On display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, it measures 10 by 11 feet and could sleep as many as 15 people.

The Simpsons
is loaded with references to cultural moments, historical people, and current events. But occasionally things happen on
The Simpsons
first…and then they happen in real life
.

O
N
THE SIMPSONS
:
In the 2001 episode “HOMR,” Homer Simpson earns extra money as a medical test subject. Doctors discover a crayon that’s been lodged in his brain since childhood and when it’s removed, Homer’s IQ doubles.

IN REAL LIFE
: In August 2007, 59-year-old Margret Wegner of Germany underwent surgery to cure the chronic headaches and nosebleeds she’d suffered since the age of four. Surgeons discovered—and removed—the cause of the problems: a pencil. Wegner remembers how it happened: As a four-year-old child, she was holding a pencil and tripped, jamming the pencil through her cheek and, apparently, into her brain. After the pencil was removed, Wegner’s symptoms instantly disappeared.

ON
THE SIMPSONS
: In the 1993 episode “$pringfield,” a casino opens in town. The entertainment there is a flamboyantly dressed German duo named Gunter and Ernst who perform magic and stunts with big cats. Their show ends prematurely when their white tiger Anastasia viciously mauls both Gunter and Ernst.

IN REAL LIFE
: Gunter and Ernst were an obvious parody of the Las Vegas magic-and-animals act Siegfried and Roy. While performing at a Las Vegas casino in 2003, Roy Horn was attacked and bitten on the neck by a white tiger named Montecore. It ruptured several nerves and only after nearly three years of rehabilitation could Horn walk again.

ON
THE SIMPSONS
:
In “Bart’s Friend Falls in Love” (1992), Homer hungrily drools over a new kind of fast-food hamburger called the “Good Morning Burger.” The recipe: “We take 18 ounces of sizzling ground beef and soak it in rich, creamery butter, then we top it off with bacon, ham, and a fried egg.” The joke is that the sandwich is so disgustingly fattening that only Homer Simpson would ever eat it.

IN REAL LIFE
: Turns out that Homer isn’t the only one who’ll eat those monstrosities. Since around 2003, gigantic thousand-plus-calorie burgers have become standard fare on fast-food menus. Wendy’s now offers a burger topped with six pieces of bacon, Burger King has a quadruple-patty bacon cheeseburger, and Carl’s Jr. makes a burger with a half-pound beef patty topped with a quarter pound of sliced prime rib. And in 2008 a New York chain called Good Burger came out with an actual “Good Morning Burger,” topped with a fried egg.

ON
THE SIMPSONS
: In the 1995 episode “Barts Sells His Soul,” Bart sells his soul to his friend Milhouse to prove that souls don’t really exist (and to pocket an easy five bucks). Bart has an anxiety attack, fearing that perhaps souls do exist…and that now he doesn’t have one. He tries to get his soul back, only to discover that Milhouse traded it to the Comic Book Guy for
Alf
pogs.

IN REAL LIFE
: In July 2008, New Zealander Walter Scott put his soul up for sale on TradeMe, an auction Web site. The listing stipulated that the winning buyer would receive a framed certificate of soul ownership, but wouldn’t be able to control Scott in any way. Ultimately, Scott’s soul was sent to Hell. Hell Pizza, a New Zealand chain, bought it for $3,800 directly from Scott after TradeMe cancelled the auction because they thought it was in poor taste. “The soul belongs to Hell. There is simply no better place for it,” a Hell spokesman told reporters.

ON
THE SIMPSONS
: In the 1999 episode “They Saved Lisa’s Brain,” Lisa leads a group of intellectuals to take over the city of Springfield. Among the collective is world-famous astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, who tells Homer that “your idea of a donut-shaped universe intrigues me. I may have to steal it.”

IN REAL LIFE
: In May 2008, researchers at Ulm University in Germany announced that after five years of study, they found evidence that the universe is small and finite (56 billion light years wide), in direct contradiction of conventional wisdom, which suggests it’s infinite. More specifically, the scientists say that temperature fluctuations indicate that the universe is round and tubular… or in other words, it’s shaped “like a donut.”

…or did you? If you didn’t, well, now you know
.

1. Paul Anka
, singer/composer (“Diana” and “My Way”)

2. Norma Shearer
, Oscar-winning actress (
The Divorcée)