Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader
Page 10
• The extraterrestrials are hiding from other extraterrestrials. Human history is filled with tragic examples of primitive civilizations that get wiped out when they come in contact with more-advanced societies. Who’s to say galactic history isn’t just as tragic? It’s possible that some alien civilizations choose to keep a low profile, out of fear of what might happen to them if an even more advanced civilization happens along and discovers them.
FUNERAL MISHAPS
A memorial service ought to be a solemn occasion in which the life of a loved
one is remembered, and their loss mourned. But like everything else in life,
it can easily be ruined by protestors, fires, lawyers, and monkeys.
HE LOOKS TERRIBLE IN THAT (LAW)SU IT
Harold St. John of New Jersey suffered from asbestos exposure, which he believed was caused by the brake linings he installed in Chrysler cars in the early 1960s. He sued Chrysler, and the suit was to go to trial on March 9, 2009. The only problem: St. John died on February 28, 2009. A trial delay motion was filed, and the family prepared for the funeral service at the Spotswood Reform Church in Jamesburg, New Jersey. But as they were praying by St. John’s graveside, a process server arrived. He immediately called off the funeral—he had a subpoena from Chrysler demanding the burial be delayed (instead of the trial) so that St. John’s body could be tested for asbestos, even though he’d already undergone extensive—and conclusive—testing while he was alive.
DO NOT SPEAK ILL OF THE DEAD
Orlando Bethel, a preacher from Loxley, Alabama, was scheduled to sing at the June 2002 funeral of Lish Taylor, his wife’s uncle. Before he began singing hymns, however, Bethel wanted to say a few words about the departed—that he was a “drunkard” and a “fornicator,” and was now “burning in Hell.” Bethel never sang—mourners attacked him, beat him up, and threw him out of the church. Bethel later claimed that “the Holy Ghost” instructed him to speak out, and added that the angry mourners were “whoremongers.”
BAD MONKEY
In 2009 several body viewings and funeral services were interrupted at Ang Yew Seng’s funeral home in Singapore. The cause: an angry monkey. Ang spotted the stray monkey in his yard and, thinking it was hungry, offered it a bushel of bananas. Instead of taking the gift, it jumped on Ang’s back and bit him. Ang pulled the monkey off himself, threw it on the ground, and ran away. The monkey, however, didn’t leave. It smashed memorial urns, chewed up flowers, swiped food from funeral receptions, and bit five mourners. After four days of unsuccessful attempts, Singapore animal control finally captured the monkey and ended its reign of terror.
UNITED IN DEATH
Teamsters Local 727 represents Chicago undertakers and hearse drivers. By the 1990s, the funeral industry in Chicago was almost completely unionized—except for the small, family-run Donnellan Funeral Home. And the Teamsters had a problem with that. So in late 1999, union members began holding protests in front of the funeral home, quietly pacing back and forth while holding pro-labor picket signs. The marching never occurred while services were being held or mourners were inside…until January 2000, when they decided to picket a funeral. As the coffin was being carried out of the home, protesters started chanting at the hearse (and the deceased’s family), “Who are we? We are Teamsters!” A Teamsters representative spoke to the media about the incident. Apology? No. If Donnellan refused to go union, he said, Teamsters would follow any mourners to churches and even to graveside services. Two weeks later, they reached an understanding. (Donnellan stayed non-union.)
DEATH AT A FUNERAL
In April 2008, 66-year-old church organist Brian Markland performed Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” at a funeral service in the Preston, England, church where he worked. Immediately after finishing the piece, Markland shut his eyes, collapsed, and fell to the floor, dead. An autopsy revealed he’d died of heart failure. Three days later, his funeral was held at the same church, where another organist played “Moonlight Sonata” (and lived).
FROM THE CLASSIFIEDS
• Fork, mangled, 50 cents. Also selling garbage disposal. Used once. Needs repair.
• Free Sundaes for Dads on Father’s Day (Dads must be 15 or older).
ROBOTS IN THE NEWS
One day, they will enslave and/or kill us all. Until then, let’s just enjoy
these stories about (mostly) friendly and innocuous robots.
BUG-BOT
In 2007 a team of researchers at Free University in Belgium developed tiny robots the size of cockroaches. They sprayed the robo-roaches with cockroach pheromones and released them among real roaches. The goal: to see if the robots could lure the cockroaches into following them. But in the end, it was the robots who followed the cockroaches (into dark corners, which is where roaches like to congregate). The scientists say the result is a major development in creating robots that can understand, adapt to, and even mimic animal behavior.
SCIENCE-BOT
Robotics scientists at Aberystwyth University in Wales and Cambridge University in England have developed a robotic scientist. “Adam” is programmed to propose a scientific hypothesis and then prove it by conducting experiments. He’s already conducted his first tests (on baker’s yeast). Ross King of Aberystwyth thinks this could lead to teams of human and robot scientists working together in labs someday, with robots conducting the tedious experiments and keeping records, which human scientists don’t like doing.
BARTENDER-BOT
London has more than 6,000 pubs, but as of 2007, it has only one that is robot-operated. The bartenders at Cynthia’s Cyberbar are robots—named Cynthia and Rastus—that are programmed to pour pints and mix drinks in the perfect proportions. And like real bartenders, they engage in friendly conversation (although their responses are all prerecorded).
LIFTER-BOT
In June 2007, a worker at a factory in Bålsta, Sweden, was trying to repair an industrial robot used to lift and move heavy rocks. The man turned off the power supply and approached the robot.
Well, he thought he’d turned off the power supply. As he came near, the robot, which is programmed to grab and lift whatever came near it, latched its “hands” around the worker’s head and lifted him into the air. The man broke free, but suffered four broken ribs in the process. Swedish police investigated the incident and fined the factory the equivalent of $3,000.
PET-BOT
The most widely known robots in the United States today are probably Roombas, the commercial line of programmable robotic vacuum cleaners. Researchers at Georgia Tech have published a study showing just how accepted Roombas have become. Despite lacking the humanoid structure of science-fiction robots (the Roomba is disc-shaped and six inches high), according to the study, owners commonly attribute human qualities to them and even name them (like pets) or dress them up in tiny outfits.
TEACHER-BOT
“Saya,” the newest teacher at Kudan Primary School in Tokyo, is the world’s first ultra-realistic robot teacher. Professor Hiroshi Kobayashi, who has been working on the project at the city’s University of Science since 1994, created Saya, a robot that looks like an attractive Japanese woman in her early 20s. He’s especially proud of her skin, which feels smooth and real because it’s made out of a very fine latex. As she conducts preprogrammed lesson plans, Saya can simulate human facial expressions and give feedback to her students. One of her 10-year-old students told reporters that she’s “pretty,” while another said she’s “scary, but fun.”
RECYCLE-BOT
Each year since the mid-1980s, more than 150 robots of various types and sizes compete in an event called “Sweeping the Nation.” In the Massachusetts Institute of Technology gymnasium, the robots pick up crushed soda cans and small piles of trash that have been scattered on the floor and place them in a “recycling center” (a milk crate). The objective: to see which robot can “recycle” the most trash in under a minute. It’s the final project for an MIT sophomore class in mechanical engineering. The top eight
finishers (the humans, not the robots) get T-shirts.
PSEUDOCIDAL TENDENCIES
In America, faking your own death is called “pseudocide.” In England it’s
called “doing a Reginald Perrin,” after a 1970s British sitcom character
who escaped from his boring job by faking his own drowning. Perrin
eventually returned from the dead and took up his life again. But
that’s not quite the way it worked with these pseudocides.
JOHN STONEHOUSE. Stonehouse was a 49-year-old rising star in Britain’s Labour Party when he went for a swim at a Miami beach in November 1974 and disappeared. He was presumed drowned, leaving a wife and daughter. But on Christmas Eve he was discovered in Melbourne, Australia, with a new identity…and his 28-year-old former secretary. Deported to England, Stonehouse was eventually convicted on 18 counts of theft, fraud, and deception relating to phony businesses he’d set up before going into hiding. He served three years of his seven-year sentence, married the secretary in 1981, and died in 1988 at the age of 62.
MARCUS SCHRENKER. Schrenker, a 38-year-old money manager from Indiana, was facing financial ruin in 2008 when authorities began to investigate him for theft (stealing from his clients) and securities fraud. What to do? First, Schrenker went to Alabama and stashed a flashy red motorcycle in a storage facility. Then he returned to Indiana and took off toward Florida in his Piper Malibu airplane. Over Huntsville, Alabama, he sent out a distress call, claiming that his windshield had imploded and he was bleeding badly, and then he parachuted 2,000 feet to safety. The plane, tracked by military aircraft trying to intercept it, flew on autopilot for another 200 miles before it crashed in a Florida swamp near several homes. It was assumed that Schrenker had been killed—but there was no blood in the plane and the windshield did not appear damaged. Schrenker, meanwhile, retrieved the motorcycle in Alabama and zoomed away toward the Florida Panhandle. He holed up in a remote campground, wrote a goodbye e-mail to a friend, and slit one wrist. By the time U.S. Marshals found him, days later, he had lost a lot of blood—but he survived. He pled guilty to federal charges and faces up to 26 years in prison.
STEVEN CHIN LEUNG. At the time of the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, 27-year-old Leung was under indictment for passport fraud in Hawaii. He saw the 9/11 tragedy as his chance to escape prosecution, so he decided to masquerade as his brother (he didn’t really have a brother) and apply for his own death certificate. First, in a phone call to his own lawyer, he posed as “Jeffrey Leung” and claimed that Steven had been working at the brokerage firm of Cantor Fitzgerald and had died in the terrorist attacks. Next he posed as “William Leung” and told the NYC Law Department the same thing. He even concocted e-mails supposedly exchanged by Steven and a deceased manager at the brokerage firm and cited the e-mails as proof that he had been in the Twin Towers on that day. When U.S. Marshals caught up with him, Steven admitted that he’d never worked in the World Trade Center and had faked his own death to avoid federal prosecution for passport fraud. The judge threw the book at him, sentencing him to four years in jail—18 months more than federal guidelines recommend for passport fraud.
SAMUEL ISRAEL III. As owner of Bayou Group LLC, a phony hedge fund based in Stamford, Connecticut, Israel bilked investors out of $450 million. He was arrested in 2005 and eventually sentenced to 20 years in prison. But on June 9, 2008, the day he was supposed to begin his sentence at a federal prison hospital (he had severe back problems and was addicted to painkillers), the 49-year-old Israel disappeared. His RV was found abandoned near the Bear Mountain Bridge in New York with the words “Suicide is painless” written in the dust on the windshield. Investigators looked for his body in the Hudson River, but found nothing. A month later, Israel resurfaced when he drove a motor scooter to a Massachusetts police station and gave himself up. He was returned to New York, where the judge who had originally sentenced him said, “Welcome back, Mr. Israel,” ordered his $500,000 bail forfeited…and added two more years to his sentence.
For more strange tales of “pseudocide,” turn to page 344.
DER FARTENFÜHRER
What was it that caused Adolf Hitler’s physical and mental health to collapse
in the closing days of World War II? He was losing the war, of course—
surely that had a great deal to do with it. But for more than 60 years,
historians have wondered if there was more to it than that.
THE LEADER
On April 21, 1945, an SS physician named Ernst-Günther
Schenck was summoned to Adolf Hitler’s bunker in Berlin and ordered to stock it with food. By that time Germany’s war was hopelessly lost—most of the country was already in Allied hands. Soviet troops had almost completely circled Berlin and were battling their way into the center of the city. Rather than flee, Hitler had decided to make his final stand in his führerbunker in the heart of the Nazi capital. He would remain there until the end, which for him was just nine days away.
Like all Germans, Dr. Schenck had been fed a steady diet of photographs, films, and propaganda posters of Hitler since the dictator had come to power in 1933. But the man he saw in the bunker looked nothing like those images. The 56-year-old Hitler “was a living corpse, a dead soul,” Schenck remembered in a 1985 interview. “His spine was hunched, his shoulder blades protruded from his bent back, and he collapsed his shoulders like a turtle.… I was looking into the eye of death.”
OLD MAN
Even more shocking than the way Hitler looked was the way he moved about the bunker. He walked with the slow, halting shuffle of a man 30 years older, dragging his left leg behind him as he went. He couldn’t go more than a few steps without grabbing onto something for support.
Hitler’s head, arms, and entire left side trembled and jerked uncontrollably. No longer able to write his own name, he signed important documents with a rubber stamp. He had always insisted on shaving himself—this murderer of millions could not bear the thought of another man holding a razor to his throat—but his trembling hands made that impossible, too. He could not lift food to his mouth without spilling it down the front of his uniform and could not take a seat without help—after he shuffled up to a table, an aide pushed a chair behind him, and he plopped down onto it.
Hitler’s mental state had deteriorated as well. His thinking was muddled, his memory was failing, and his emotions whipsawed back and forth between long bouts of irrational euphoria (especially irrational considering how close Germany was to defeat) and fits of screaming, uncontrollable rage that lasted for hours.
DIAGNOSES
Schenck remained in Berlin until the end. On April 29, Hitler married his longtime mistress, Eva Braun, and the following day the pair committed suicide in the führerbunker. Germany surrendered unconditionally on May 7.
After the war, Schenck spent a decade in Soviet prison camps. He never forgot what he saw at the führerbunker, and after his release he spent years poring over Hitler’s medical records in an attempt to discover just what had caused the dictator’s health to decline so rapidly in the final years and months of his life.
He was not alone in this effort—in the more than 60 years since the end of the war, many historians, physicians, and World War II buffs have done the same thing. What caused Hitler’s collapse—was it Parkinson’s disease? Tertiary syphilis? Giant cell arteritis? Countless theories have been advanced to explain Hitler’s physical and mental decline, and after all this time the experts are no closer to agreeing than they were on the day he died.
THE CURE THAT ILLS
One of the most bizarre theories was advanced by some of Hitler’s own doctors in July 1944. The diagnosis came about by chance, after a visiting ear, nose, and throat specialist named Dr. Erwin Giesing happened to notice six tiny black pills—“Doctor Koester’s Anti-Gas Pills”—sitting on the Führer’s breakfast tray next to his porridge, dry bread, and orange juice. After spotting the pills, Giesing did something that Hitler’s own personal phy
sician, an eccentric quack named Dr. Theodor Morell, had apparently never bothered to do: He examined the tin the pills came in and actually read the label to see what was in them. Giesing was stunned by what he read. Could it be? Was the Führer was being poisoned by the pills he took to control his meteorism—powerful attacks of uncontrollable farting?
GUT FEELING
Hitler had suffered from digestive problems his entire life. Since childhood he’d been prone to crippling, painful stomach cramps during times of emotional distress. By the time he reached his early 40s, the cramping had become more frequent, often accompanied by violent attacks of farting, along with alternating bouts of constipation and diarrhea.
The farting attacks are one of the reasons Hitler became a vegetarian in the early 1930s: He didn’t trust doctors, so rather than seek professional help for his condition he tried to treat it himself by eliminating meat, rich foods, milk, and butter from his diet in favor of raw and cooked vegetables and whole grains.