Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (66 page)

One night in May 2008, two security cameras suddenly stopped working at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, British Columbia. Shortly after that, the security guard received a call from the alarm company informing him that there was a problem with the security system and to ignore any automated alarms that may occur…which he did. Bad move: The next morning, the guard discovered that 15 art pieces, worth $2 million, were gone. And the alarm company had no records of any calls leaving their headquarters.

Each year the Golden Raspberry Foundation “honors” the year’s worst movies. Here are some memorable lines from Worst Picture winners
.

Tom Green:
Are you okay?

Marisa Coughlan:
I’d be a lot better if you beat my legs with these bamboo reeds.

—
Freddy Got Fingered

“That’s such a good name.
‘Tom Lone’ rhymes with cone, bone, phone. Not that rhyming’s all that important.”

—
Alex Borstein,
Catwoman

“I feel like a dolphin who’s never tasted melted snow. What does the color blue taste like?”

—
Andie MacDowell,
Hudson Hawk

“We may have lost the war, but we haven’t lost our sense of humor—even when we lose a lung, a spleen, a bladder, 35 feet of small intestine, two legs, and our ability to reproduce.”

—
Kenneth Branagh,
Wild Wild West

“In the way of love, we’re kindergarten toddlers.”

—
Bo Derek,
Bolero

Prince:
I must have that disease, what’s the name of it?
Kristin Scott Thomas:
It’s called stupid.

—
Under the Cherry Moon

“I am going to make you as happy as a baby Psychlo on a straight diet of kerbango.”

—
Kelly Preston,
Battlefield Earth

Opening title card:
“This is not a documentary of the war in Korea but a dramatized study of the effect of war on a group of people. Where dramatic license has been deemed necessary, the authors have taken advantage of this license to dramatize the subject.”

—
Inchon

“How much mail can a dead postman deliver?”

—
Kevin Costner,
The Postman

“I’m so terrifical, I have my own toll-free number: 1-800-UNBELIEVABLE.”

—
Andrew “Dice” Clay,
The Adventures of Ford Fairlane

Life is full of little slips-ups. Here are a few more tales of seemingly simple things that went very, very wrong
.

Y
OU NAME IT
A computer’s spell-checking program only works when there’s a human around to double-check that it’s not turning people’s names into words. Otherwise it could lead to a mishap like the 2008 Middletown Area (Pennsylvania) High School Yearbook. Only four pages were affected, but that came as no relief to Kathy Airbag (Carbaugh), Max Supernova (Zupanovic), and Alexandria Impolite (Ippolito), who said, “It was kind of funny but kind of rude at the same time.” The printing company sent out little stickers printed with the correct names, reassuring the students that “this kind of thing happens all the time.”

In 2007 Robert Glasser and Joey Acosta, two friends from Chaparral, New Mexico, wanted to get matching gun tattoos. For an added touch of realism, the 22-year-olds decided to trace the patterns onto each other’s arms using a .357 Magnum. Bad idea: The gun was loaded. It fired as Glasser was tracing the trigger; the bullet travelled through his hand and then hit Acosta’s arm. Both men survived. (No word on whether they ever got the tattoos.)

A 49-year-old Japanese man (name not released) went to his doctor complaining of abdominal pain. After an MRI, he was informed that he had a large tumor that had to be removed immediately. When the surgeons went in, they did find a large lump in his abdomen, but it wasn’t a tumor. It was a surgical towel. The doctors described it as “greenish blue, although we are not sure about its original color.” It turned out that the towel had been in the man’s gut for 25 years—doctors treating him for an ulcer in 1983 accidentally left it there. Officials from the hospital that performed the 1983 surgery apologized for the goof and promised to pay all of the man’s medical bills. Amazingly, he isn’t suing.

On page 44 we told about works of drama and film that were lost to the ravages of time. But they aren’t the only artworks that have vanished. Tragically, books, paintings—and even classic TV programs—sometimes suffer the same fate
.

T
ELEVISION
Programs from television’s early years, the 1940s and 1950s, weren’t saved…because there were few ways to preserve them. Videotape was introduced in 1956, but it was so expensive that networks recycled tapes dozens of times. (A show would be recorded on the tape in the studio, the show was broadcast, then the tape was erased and reused.) Sometimes a process called kinescoping or telerecording was used in order to save shows for later broadcast—a video monitor was filmed by a 35mm camera—but many early shows are gone for good. Here are some notable losses:

•
The Tonight Show
.
The first 10 years of Johnny Carson’s tenure as host of the classic late-night show (1962–1972) were recorded and aired using recycled videotapes. Result: Just a handful of segments—Carson’s personal favorites, saved only at his request—survive. The rest of the entire 10 years is gone.

•
Beulah
.
This sitcom aired on ABC from 1950 to 1953. It was the first television show to star an African-American performer. Of the 87 episodes, 80 are lost.

•
DuMont shows.
When the DuMont Network, one of the first broadcasters, went out of business in 1956, ABC took over many of its facilities. Needing warehouse space, ABC employees dumped hundreds of DuMont kinescopes—nearly its entire 1947–1956 output—into Upper New York Bay in the early 1970s, forever losing footage of early TV shows such as
Your Show of Shows
with Sid Caesar, and
Captain Video
, which was the first science-fiction program. The network produced more than 300 episodes of
Mary Kay and Johnny
, considered by historians to be the first TV sitcom, but only a few minutes of footage survive.

•
Soap operas.
Networks didn’t begin to save soap episodes until the late 1970s, believing there was zero replay value in serialized
dramas. For example, only the 1982–1986 episodes of
Search For Tomorrow
were saved—the episodes from 1951 to the early ’80s are long gone.

•
Game shows.
The networks didn’t think game shows had any replay value, either. Only a few episodes each of the original black-and-white runs of
To Tell the Truth, Concentration, Match Game
, and
The Price is Right
still exist. ABC’s
$10,000
(later
$20,000
)
Pyramid
ran from 1973 to 1980, but just 15 episodes survive. At least three game shows from the ’60s and ’70s are entirely gone, with not even a pilot episode surviving:
Split Second, Second Chance
, and
Snap Judgment
(hosted by Ed McMahon).

•
Jeopardy
!
Videotapes were used over and over to capture each day’s broadcast of the original run of
Jeopardy
!, hosted by Art Fleming in the 1960s and 1970s. Only four episodes are still around.

•
Doctor Who
.
In 1975 the BBC needed to make room in its vault, so it removed and erased thousands of tapes. Network executives realized they’d made a mistake in 1980, when the BBC science-fiction series
Doctor Who
became a hit on American public television. In trying to round up the show’s earliest episodes from 1963 (so as to sell them to PBS), the BBC found out they’d taped over 108 episodes of
Doctor Who
.

•
News and sports.
The BBC’s coverage of the 1969 Moon landing was taped over. CBS and NBC both broadcast Super Bowl I, and neither kept the tape. Parts of nearly all World Series broadcasts between 1947 (when they began) and 1974 are missing. For example, only the first few innings of one game of the 1955 Series remains, and the 1947–1949 broadcasts are gone entirely.

•
Sylvia Plath.
Plath was primarily a poet but is best known for
The Bell Jar
, a thinly veiled fictionalization of her descent into severe depression. Plath committed suicide a month after
The Bell Jar
was published in 1963. After her death, the manuscript for her unpublished second novel,
Double Take
, disappeared.

•
James Joyce.
The Irish author (
Ulysses, Finnegans Wake
) wrote a play called
A Brilliant Career
. He hated it, his publisher hated it, and so Joyce burned it.

•
T. E. Lawrence.
Lawrence (the real-life “Lawrence of Arabia”)
wrote a 10-volume memoir called
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
about his time fighting in the Arab Revolt of 1916–1918. In 1919 Lawrence accidentally left his only copy on a bench in a train station in Reading, England, and had to rewrite it from memory.

•
Herman Melville.
Now it’s a classic, but Melville’s
Moby-Dick
was not well received during the author’s lifetime. In fact, Harper & Brothers, Melville’s publisher, rejected his follow-up novel,
Isle of the Cross
, in 1853. It has since been lost.

•
Ernest Hemingway.
In 1922 Hemingway’s wife, Elizabeth Richardson, was traveling with a suitcase carrying all of Hemingway’s unpublished fiction to that point: 20 short stories and a nearly finished novel about World War I. The suitcase was stolen and never recovered.

•
Le Peintre
(1963). This Picasso painting was in the cargo bay of Swissair Flight 111 when it crashed into the Atlantic Ocean near Nova Scotia in September 1998.
Le Peintre
was never recovered.

•
Still Life: Vase with Five Sunflowers
(1888). Vincent Van Gogh painted a series of six still lifes depicting various numbers of sunflowers in vases. This one is gone. Once in the collection of a Japanese art collector, it burned up in an American air raid during World War II. Around the same time, Van Gogh’s
The Painter on His Way to Work
and
The Park at Arles with the Entrance Seen Through Trees
were also destroyed in World War II bombing raids in Berlin.

•
The Buddhas of Bamyan
(6th Century A.D.). Carved in what is now Afghanistan, the two sandstone statues were gigantic representations of the Buddha measuring 180 and 121 feet tall. They were destroyed with dynamite in 2001 by the ruling Taliban government, which felt the statues were idols and were therefore forbidden under Muslim law.

“When you step on the brakes, your life is in your foot’s hands.”

—
George Carlin