Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader

by Michael Brunsfeld

  But even with all the advances that have been—and will be—made in timekeeping, we may never be able to create a clock that is accurate enough to ensure that everyone will show up to a meeting on time.

  * * *

  FUTURE TENSE

  In spring 2005, MIT engineering student Amal Dorai set out to prove that time travel is possible. But instead of testing scientific theories (traveling at light speed, going through a black hole), he invited time travelers of the future to a “Time Traveler Convention” at MIT at 10 p.m., on May 7, 2005. People from the future would be aware of such a congregation, he said, and if time travel was really possible, they’d show up. Nobody showed up. So that proves time travel doesn’t exist, right? Not necessarily. Dorai’s theories: Perhaps there’s a cataclysmic event in the near future, in which humanity will be wiped out; or perhaps the people of the future are too dumb to figure out time travel; or maybe future humans find present humans boring and decided not to come.

  Average speed of a dog sled being pulled by 10 dogs: 15 mph.

  KID STUFF

  Just because you’re young doesn’t mean you can’t make a difference. Here are a few of the remarkable kids featured in Elizabeth Rusch’s book, Generation Fix.

  ZACHARY EBERS of St. Louis, Missouri, was 14 when he thought up Breakfast Bonanza, a program that helps feed kids in school breakfast programs over the summer. He collected 5,000 boxes of cereal to give to food banks and pantries.

  DUSTIN HILL, 14, didn’t let his battle with cancer stop him from getting fresh fruit and vegetables to hungry people in Portland, Oregon. He founded PlanIt Kids, a group that tends his organic garden and gathers produce from U-Pick farms to feed the poor.

  LACY JONES, KATE KLINKERMAN, and BARBARA BROWN, ages 16, 15, and 15, started Don’t Be Crude, an oil-recycling program in rural Texas, as a 4-H project. Since then, their program has kept more than 30,000 gallons of used oil and herbicides out of the ground in their community.

  ANN LAI of Beachwood, Ohio, was 16 when she invented a microsensor that measures sulfur dioxide emissions. SO2 is the most damaging chemical in acid rain, so Ann’s sensor has the potential to be used to monitor factory smokestacks everywhere.

  APRIL MATHEWS and KERRI STEPHEN, both 14, started a support program for homeless kids in Woodbridge, Virginia, after April’s family lost their home. It’s called AfterShare Kids.

  KRISTEL ROSE PAÇANA FRITZ was shocked that many kids who’d lost their hair from cancer didn’t have wigs to cover their heads. So she talked dozens of high schoolers in San Jose, California, into donating their hair to Locks of Love, a program that provides wigs to kids and others with medical hair loss.

  CHARLIE KING JR. and DAVON KING felt that police in Eastpointe, Michigan, were unfairly stopping African-American kids from riding their bikes in the predominantly white Detroit suburb. So they sued…and the judge agreed. They won the suit.

  Fleas jump at 140 times the force of gravity—20 times that of a space shuttle during launch.

  LOONEY LAWS

  Believe it or not, these laws are real.

  A train conductor in Illinois may not collect fares without wearing his conductor hat.

  It’s against the law to slap a man on the back in Georgia.

  In Fort Madison, Iowa, the fire department is legally required to practice for fifteen minutes before going to a fire.

  In Warren, Idaho, puppets must wear distinctly American clothes.

  It is illegal to mispronounce the word “Joliet,” but only in Joliet, Illinois.

  By law, restaurants in Kansas may not serve ice cream on cherry pie.

  It’s against the law to yell “Oh boy!” in Jonesboro, Georgia.

  New Hampshire law says that when two cars meet at an intersection, each must wait for the other to pass.

  If you’re in a meat market in Los Angeles, do not poke the turkey to see how tender it is.

  Minnesota forbids women from impersonating Santa Claus.

  Unrestrained giggling on the street is illegal in Helena, Montana.

  It’s illegal to draw funny faces on window shades in Garfield County, Montana.

  Newark, New Jersey, forbids the sale of ice after 6 p.m. without a prescription.

  In South Foster, Rhode Island, any dentist who extracts the wrong tooth must have a similar tooth pulled by the village blacksmith.

  Any map that does not prominently display the city of Lima, Ohio, is illegal to sell in Lima, Ohio.

  In Portland, Maine, it’s illegal to tickle a girl under the chin with a feather duster.

  In Seattle it’s illegal to carry a concealed weapon that exceeds six feet in length.

  A dead juror may not serve on a jury in Oregon.

  Know your rhinos: African rhinos have two horns; Indian and Javan rhinos have one.

  THE DEATH RAY!

  We see a lot of crazy contraptions in science fiction movies. But real scientists—some crazier than others—have actually tried to build them.

  MACHINE: Death Ray

  WHAT IT DOES: Vaporize enemy planes

  SCIENTIST: Nikola Tesla (1856–1943)

  Tesla was one of the greatest inventors of all time. His genius is the reason we use alternating current (AC) to power electric appliances. He invented the first radio, radar, radio-controlled ships, and the speedometer. He also invented the “Tesla Coil,” familiar from Frankenstein movies for its arcing bolts of electricity, but still used today for sending radio and TV signals over long distances.

  In 1943 the 87-year-old Tesla contacted the U.S. War Department and offered to sell them his secret “teleforce” weapon, a cosmic ray gun that would shoot a narrow stream of accelerated atoms at enemy airplanes up to 250 miles away…and melt them. The War Department thought Tesla was crazy and declined the offer. Tesla then offered the weapon to several European nations, but before any could take him up on it, he passed away.

  Tesla was said to have stored a compact prototype of the “death ray” in a trunk in the basement of his hotel. After his death a Russian spy purportedly raided his room and stole a safe containing the plans for the device, along with the prototype.

  In 1943 Tesla was thought to be a lunatic, but 40 years later, President Ronald Reagan successfully pitched the same basic idea to Congress and called it “Star Wars.”

  MACHINE: Orgone Energy Accumulator

  WHAT IT DOES: Collects energy to use as a power source

  SCIENTIST: Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957)

  Reich was famous for his pioneering studies in sex and psychology. In 1939 he became convinced that an endless supply of invisible “life force” energy, which he called orgone, surrounded the Earth in vast moving currents. He invented a special box, or “accumulator,” to trap the orgone.

  Davey Crockett never wore a coonskin cap. (Disney made that up.)

  Reich’s orgone accumulator was a six-sided box built of alternating layers of organic and metallic materials. The organic layers attracted the Earth’s orgone and the metallic layers radiated the energy toward the center of the box. Patients would sit inside the box and absorb the orgone into their skin and lungs, which was supposed to improve the flow of life energy and release any energy blocks that might be making the patient ill.

  Reich used the orgone accumulator as part of a controversial cancer therapy and opened several clinics to deliver it. But the FDA charged him with violating the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act by making false and misleading claims to the public. A judge ordered that every orgone accumulator be destroyed and Reich thrown in jail, where he died of heart failure in 1957.

  Since his death, Reich’s followers have looked for a way to turn orgone into usable power, but without success. The problem, they say, is that Reich ordered his research papers to be sealed for 50 years, because he felt the world wasn’t ready for his advanced ideas. His papers are to be unsealed in 2007. Perhaps then we’ll find out if there’s any truth to the orgone business.

  MACHINE: Anti-Gravity Flying Saucer

&nbs
p; WHAT IT DOES: Flies by repelling gravity

  SCIENTIST: Thomas Townsend Brown (1905–1985)

  Brown was an American physicist best known for his attempts to use gravitational fields as a means of propulsion. In the 1920s, he found that when he charged a capacitor to a high voltage, it moved toward its positive pole, creating an “ion wind.” He claimed that this effect proved a link between electrical charge and gravitational mass, and could be harnessed to create flight. In 1953 Brown demonstrated his “electrogravitic” propulsion for the U.S. Army at Pearl Harbor by flying a pair of metal disks around a 50-foot course. Energized by 150,000 volts, the disks, which were three feet in diameter, purportedly reached speeds of several hundred miles per hour. According to Brown, the military immediately classified the project and no more was heard about it. But throughout the 1950s, Brown’s work was cited as a possible explanation for how UFOs might be able to fly.

  They are what they eat: When ribbon worms run out of food, they eat themselves.

  MACHINE: Project Habbakuk

  WHAT IT DOES: Unsinkable aircraft carrier made of ice

  SCIENTIST: Geoffrey Pyke (1894–1948)

  In 1943 Pyke, a science advisor to the British military, made a radical proposal: build unsinkable aircraft carriers out of ice to protect Atlantic convoys against attacks from German U-boats. The scale of these floating landing strips would be immense: 2,000 feet long with a 50-foot-thick hull and a displacement of 2 million tons. And since they were to be made out of ice, the vessels would have been virtually unsinkable, but easy to repair if damaged by torpedoes. A 1,000-ton prototype was being built on Patricia Lake in Alberta, but the project was abandoned when the British were informed that it would cost $70 million and take 8,000 people working for eight months to build it. The refrigeration units were turned off and the hull sank to the bottom of the lake, where it melted.

  MACHINE: Newman Motor/Generator

  WHAT IT DOES: Produces an almost endless supply of energy

  SCIENTIST: Joseph Newman (1936–)

  Accepted laws of physics say that you can’t get more energy out of a generator than you put into it. Newman, a self-taught scientist from Louisiana, thinks otherwise. He’s patented a generator that he claims operates at over 100 percent efficiency, effectively generating more energy than it uses. If his machine works as he describes it, that would mean all powered machines—cars, boats, home appliances, airplanes—could run forever on a single fuel charge.

  Unfortunately, Newman has been unable to convince the scientific community that his generator works. The National Bureau of Standards tested his machine and found that his generator only delivered 33 percent to 67 percent of the energy put into it. Another test by engineers from Mississippi State University had the generator working at 70 percent efficiency. Have these reversals sent Newman back to the drawing board? Not at all. He continues to tinker with his generator, raising money for future work by auctioning off scale models of it.

  See for yourself: No matter which way his head points, Mickey Mouse’s ears face forward.

  THE CURSE OF THE CURSING STONE

  A flood. A fire. A recession. A livestock disease and a crummy soccer team. Could it all be the work of a rock with a curse chiseled into it? Some folks in England think so.

  THE BAD LANDS

  In the late 1500s, the border between England and Scotland was in dispute, and neither kingdom was able to maintain law and order in the region. The area became known as the “Bad Lands.” Local criminals—notorious for pillaging nearby villages, murdering their inhabitants, and making off with their livestock—were called “reivers” (reive meant “to rob” in Old English).

  In 1525 the archbishop of Glasgow decided he’d had enough. He sat down and composed a long curse against the reivers and ordered it read from the pulpit of every church. “I curse their head and all the hairs on their head,” the curse began, “I curse their face, their brain, their mouth, their nose, their tongue, their teeth, their forehead,” and on and on for more than 1,000 words, making it one of the longest curses in recorded history.

  The curse had no effect—the Bad Lands stayed bad until 1603, when Queen Elizabeth I of England died and her cousin, King James VI of Scotland, was crowned King James I of England. Now that the same king ruled both Scotland and England, the border dispute became moot and law and order were restored.

  THE CURSING STONE

  The archbishop’s curse made news again in the late 1990s, when the city of Carlisle, England, nine miles south of the Scottish border, commissioned a local artist named Gordon Young to create something special for the city’s millennium celebration.

  The city wanted the artwork to reflect the local history, so Young, who claims reiver ancestry, carved 383 words of the archbishop’s curse into a 14-ton granite boulder. Then, despite the objections of local religious groups who feared the stone would bring bad luck, the city council placed the “cursing stone” in an underground walkway connecting Carlisle Castle with a nearby museum, right in the center of the city. Cost: $19,000.

  59% of wives do 10 or more hours of housework per week; only 22% of husbands do.

  BETTER LATE THAN NEVER

  Do curses, like wine, improve with age? The Archbishop’s curse didn’t work back in 1525, but shortly after the boulder was installed, downtown Carlisle was hit by its worst flood in 100 years, followed by an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, a severe economic downturn, and a major fire. And Carlisle United, the local soccer team, played so poorly that it was thrown out of its league.

  After five years of what seemed like unrelenting bad luck, in early 2005 City Councillor Jim Tootle accused the stone of causing “disasters reaching biblical proportions.” He introduced a motion to destroy the stone—or at least move it outside city limits. “Most people treat it as a joke,” Tootle said, “but when they start to sit down and think, there might well be something in it. Something is coming from this stone.” Estimated cost of removing the stone: $10,000.

  But the 52 councillors voted to keep the stone where it was; it’s there today if you want to see it. Gordon Young, who’s also a rabid Carlisle United fan, denies the stone has caused the city’s misfortunes and says he’s relieved by the decision. “It’s a powerful work of art but it’s certainly not part of the occult,” he says. “If I thought my sculpture would have affected one Carlisle United result, I would have smashed it myself years ago.”

  Two months later, Carlisle’s unemployment rate went up.

  THE CURSE

  So how powerful is the curse? Here it is in its entirety—read it and decide for yourself. (If your luck starts to turn, feel free to rip these pages out of the book along the dotted line.)

  I curse their head and all the hairs of their head; I curse their face, their brain, their mouth, their nose, their tongue, their teeth, their forehead, their shoulders, their breast, their heart, their stomach, their back, their womb, their arms, their legs, their hands, their feet, and every part of their body, from the top of their head to the soles of their feet, before and behind, within and without.

  I curse them going and I curse them riding; I curse them standing and I curse them sitting; I curse them eating and I curse them drinking; I curse them rising, and I curse them lying; I curse them at home, I curse them away from home; I curse them within the house, I curse them outside of the house; I curse their wives, their children, and their servants who participate in their deeds. I curse their crops, their cattle, their wool, their sheep, their horses, their swine, their geese, their hens, and all their livestock. I curse their halls, their chambers, their kitchens, their stanchions, their barns, their cowsheds, their barnyards, their cabbage patches, their plows, their harrows, and the goods and houses that are necessary for their sustenance and welfare.

  We’re #2! Worldwide, China has the most executions, followed by the United States.

  May all the malevolent wishes and curses ever known, since the beginning of the world, to this hour, light on them
. May the malediction of God, that fell upon Lucifer and all his fellows, that cast them from the high Heaven to the deep hell, light upon them.

  May the fire and the sword that stopped Adam from the gates of Paradise, stop them from the glory of Heaven, until they forebear, and make amends.

  Hmm. We don’t know why, but our typesetter

  seems to have met with a mysterious end.

  * * *

  AND NOW…A HUMOR BRAKE

  One day an auto mechanic was working under a car and some brake fluid accidentally dripped into his mouth. “Wow,” he thought to himself. “That stuff tastes good!” The next day he told a friend about his amazing discovery. “It’s really good,” he said. “I think I’ll have a little more today.” His friend was concerned but didn’t say anything. The next day the mechanic told his friend he’d drunk an entire cup full of the brake fluid. “It’s great stuff!” A few days later he was up to a bottle a day. And now his friend was really worried.

  “Don’t you know brake fluid is toxic? It’s very bad for you,” said the friend. “You’d better stop drinking it.”

  “Hey, no problem,” he said. “I can stop any time.”

  In the movie Twister, the sound of the tornado was created by slowing down a camel’s moan.

  HERE COMES THE SPAMMOBILE!

  You’ve heard of the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile; maybe you’ve even seen it in person. Here are a few more vehicles to watch for while Uncle John finalizes his design for the Pot Rod.