Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader (5 page)

THE ARTIST:
Michael Landy, a London conceptual artist
THE WORK:
Break Down
THIS IS ART?
By age 37, Landy had become so fed up with materialism that he gathered every single thing he owned—7,006 items in all—and staged their destruction in a 14-day exhibit he called an “examination of consumerism.” As Landy supervised, 12 workers systematically destroyed everything from family heirlooms to dirty socks to his Saab 900. They smashed the big stuff with hammers and shredded the smaller stuff, reducing all of it to piles of pebble-sized trash, destined to end up in a landfill. More than 45,000 spectators witnessed the “art piece.” His next work: Getting new credit cards, new keys, a new passport, a new birth certificate, new shoes, and a new suit. “I found it a bit soul-destroying,” he said. “I really didn’t want to buy anything.”

The Venus flytrap only grows wild in one place: a 100-mile stretch of Carolina swampland.

THE ARTIST:
Marilene Oliver, a London art student
THE WORK:
I Know You Inside Out
THIS IS ART?
In 1993 a convicted killer named Joseph Jernigan was put to death by lethal injection. After the execution, Jernigan’s body was frozen, then sliced (crosswise) into 1,871 micro-thin cross-sections and photographed for medical students. The images were also posted on the Internet, which is where Marilene Oliver found them in 2001. She printed them out, cut them to shape, and stacked them to create a life-size figure of the murderer.

Still not satisfied, Oliver scanned her own skin on a flatbed scanner and created a touch screen display next to the Jernigan figure, kind of like Adam and Eve. This one she called
I Know Every Inch of Your Body
.

MORE “ART”

How to Make a Quick Buck:
First, get a cup of coffee in a Styrofoam cup. Drink the coffee. Attach the coffee-stained cup to a piece of wood. Find a dead ladybug. Attach that to the same piece of wood. Call the piece
Untitled
and enter it into a New York City art auction. That’s what modern artist Tom Friedman did in 1999. The winning bid: $29,900.

How to Get Rid of a Stack of Newspapers:
At the same auction an unnamed artist entered a piece that consisted of a stack of newspapers. He called it
Stack of Newspapers
. Unfortunately for him, no bids were made on the “artwork.”

And the idea wasn’t even original—the previous year, artist Robert Gober had entered a tied stack of newspapers into a Sotheby’s auction which he called,
Newspaper, 1992
. It sold for $19,000.

Bad sign: Mozambique has an AK-47 assault rifle on its flag.

THE TIME IT TAKES

It takes the average bathroom reader one minute and fifteen seconds to read the average page of a
Bathroom Reader.
Here are some more examples of how long things take (or took
).

•
.05 second
for a human muscle to respond to stimulus

•
.06 second
for an automotive airbag to fully inflate

•
.2 second
for the Int’l Space Station to travel 1 mile

•
.46 second
for a 90-mph fastball to reach home plate

•
.6 second
for an adult to walk one step

•
1 second
for a humming-bird’s wings to beat 70 times

•
1.25 seconds
for light to travel from the moon to Earth

•
3 seconds
for 475 lawsuits to be filed around the world

•
4 seconds
for 3,000,000 gallons of water to flow over Niagara Falls

•
10 seconds
for 50 people to be born

•
20 seconds
for a fast talker to say 100 words

•
58 seconds
for the elevator in Toronto’s CN Tower to reach the top (1,815 feet)

•
1 minute
for a newborn baby’s brain to grow 1.5 mg

•
45 minutes
to reach an actual person when calling the IRS during tax time

•
4 hours
for the
Titanic
to sink after it struck the iceberg

•
4 hrs, 30 min
to cook a 20-pound turkey at 325°F

•
92 hrs
to read both the Old and New Testaments aloud

•
96 hours
to completely recover from jet lag

•
6 days
, according to the Bible, to create the universe

•
7 days
for a newborn baby to wet or soil 80 diapers

•
19 days
until baby cardinals make their first flight

•
25 days
for Handel to compose “The Messiah”

•
29 days, 12 hrs, 44 mins, and 3 secs
from a new moon to a new moon

Dough doe? Animal Crackers come in 18 different “species.”

•
30 days
for a human hair to grow half an inch

•
35 days
for a mouse to reach sexual maturity

•
38 days
for a slow boat to get to China (from New York)

•
12 weeks
for a U.S. Marine to go through boot camp

•
89 days, 1 hour
, for winter to come and go

•
91 days, 7 hrs, 26 mins, and 24 secs
for the Earth to fall into the Sun if it loses its orbit

•
258 days
for the gestation period of a yak

•
1 year
for Los Angeles to move two inches closer to San Francisco (due to the shifting of tectonic plates)

•
2 years
for cheddar cheese to reach its peak flavor

•
4 yrs, 8 mos
to receive your FBI file after making the appropriate request

•
6 years
in a snail’s life span

•
25 years
equals the time the average American spends asleep in a lifetime

•
27 years
was the length of Nolan Ryan’s pitching career

•
33 years
was the life expectancy of a Neanderthal man

•
69 years
for the Soviet Union to rise and fall

•
95 years
to count to a billion

•
100 years
for tidal friction to slow Earth’s rotation by 14 seconds

•
1,800 years
to complete the Great Wall of China

•
500,000 years
for plutonium-239 to become harmless

•
45.36 million years
to reach the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, in a car going 65 mph

•
1 billion years
for the sun to release as much energy as a supernova releases in 24 hours

*        *        *

POLITICAL DARWINISM

“In my lifetime, we’ve gone from Eisenhower to George W. Bush. We’ve gone from John F. Kennedy to Al Gore. If this is evolution, I believe that in 12 years, we’ll be voting for plants.”

—
Lewis Black

How long American drivers wait at traffic lights in their lifetime: 14 days.

THE WILHELM SCREAM

Have you ever heard a sound effect in a film—a screeching eagle, a car crash, or a laughing crowd—that you
swear
you’ve heard before in other movies? You’re probably right. Here’s the story behind Hollywood’s most famous “recycled” sound effect
.

S
OUNDS FAMILIAR
Like most American kids growing up in the 1950s, Ben Burtt went to the movies…
a lot
. Movie budgets were much smaller back then, and film studios reused whatever they could—props, sets, stock footage, sound effects, everything. If you watched and listened to the movies carefully, you might have noticed things you’d seen and heard in other movies.

Burtt noticed. He was good at picking out sounds—especially screams, and especially one scream in particular. “Every time someone died in a Warner Bros. movie, they’d scream this famous scream,” he says.

By the 1970s, a grown-up Burtt was working in the movie business himself, as a sound designer—the guy who creates the sound effects. Years had passed, but he’d never forgotten that classic Warner Bros. scream. So when he got the chance, he decided to track down the original recording. It took a lot of digging, but he eventually found it on an old studio reel marked “Man Being Eaten by an Alligator.” It turns out it had been recorded for the 1951 Warner Bros. western
Distant Drums
and used at least twice in that movie: once in a battle with some Indians, and then—of course—when a man is bitten and dragged underwater by an alligator.

A STAR IS BORN

No one could remember what actor had originally been hired to record the scream, so Burtt jokingly named it after a character in the 1953 movie,
Charge at Feather River
. The character, named Wilhelm, screams the scream after he is struck in the leg by an arrow. The “Wilhelm Scream” was used two more times in that film: once when a soldier is struck by a spear, and again when an Indian is stabbed and then rolls down a hill.

The Wilhelm Scream is now more than 50 years old, but if you heard it you’d probably recognize it, because Burtt, who’s worked on almost every George Lucas film, uses it often—including in his Academy Award-winning sound design for
Star Wars
. “That scream gets in every picture I do, as a personal signature,” he says.

Top 5 causes of home accidents: stairs, glass doors, cutlery, jars, power tools (in that order).

So when you hear a Wilhelm Scream in a film, can you assume that Burtt did the sound effects? No—when other sound designers heard what he was doing, they started inserting the scream into their movies, too. Apparently, Burtt isn’t the only person good at noticing reused sound effects, because movie buffs have caught on to what he is doing and discovered at least 66 films that use the Wilhelm Scream. A few examples:

AHHHHHHHHHEEEEEIIIIII!!!

Star Wars
(1977)
Just before Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia swing across the Death Star’s chasm, a stormtrooper falls in.

The Empire Strikes Back
(1980)
1) In the battle on the ice planet Hoth, a rebel soldier screams when his big satellite-dish laser gun is struck by laser fire and explodes. 2) As Han Solo is being frozen, Chewbacca knocks a stormtrooper off of the platform.

Return of the Jedi
(1983)
1) In the desert scene, Luke slashes an enemy with his light saber. The victim screams as he falls into the Sarlac pit. 2) Later in the film, Han Solo knocks a man over a ledge. The man is Ben Burtt himself, making a cameo appearance—and that’s him impersonating the Wilhelm Scream…with his own voice.

Batman Returns
(1992)
Batman punches a clown and knocks him out of the way. The clown screams.

Toy Story
(1995)
Buzz Lightyear screams when he gets knocked out of the bedroom window.

Titanic
(1997)
In the scene where the engine room is flooding, a crew member screams when he’s hit with a jet of water.

Spaceballs
(1987)
Barf uses a section of tubes to reflect laser bolts back at four guards. The last one screams.

Lethal Weapon 4
(1998)
A gunshot turns a terrorist’s flamethrower into a jet pack, and he flies into a gasoline truck.

Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
(2002)
A soldier falls off the wall during the Battle of Helm’s Deep…and lets out a Wilhelm.

Insomniac: A giraffe only sleeps about 4 hours a day.

NOT WHAT THEY SEEM TO BE

Things (and people) aren’t always what they seem. Here are some peeks behind the image
.

J
OHN JAMES AUDUBON
Image:
Considered a pioneer of American wildlife conservation, this 19th-century naturalist spent days at a time searching for birds in the woods so he could paint them. The National Audubon Society was founded in 1905 in his honor.

Actually:
Audubon found the birds, then shot them. In addition to painting, he was an avid hunter. According to David Wallechinsky in
Significa
, “He achieved unequaled realism by using freshly killed models held in lifelike poses by wires. Sometimes he shot dozens of birds just to complete a single picture.”

WASHINGTON CROSSING THE DELAWARE

Image:
One of the most famous paintings of American history depicts General George Washington—in a fierce battle against the redcoats—leading his men across the Delaware River on Christmas Eve 1776.

Actually:
It was painted 75 years after the battle by a German artist named Leutze. He used American tourists as models and substituted the Rhine River for the Delaware. He got the style of boat wrong; the clothing was wrong; even the American flag was incorrect. Yet the drama of the daring offensive was vividly captured, making it one of our most recognized paintings.

WEBSTER’S DICTIONARY

Image:
The oldest and most trusted dictionary in the United States, created in 1828 by Noah Webster.

Actually:
“The truth is,” says M. Hirsh Goldberg in
The Book of Lies
, “is that any dictionary maker can put
Webster’s
in the name, because book titles can’t be copyrighted.” And a lot of shoddy publishers do just that. To know if your
Webster’s
is authentic, make sure it’s published by Merriam-Webster, Inc.