Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  The Natural World. In 1996 a California biologist named Barry Sinervo published a study claiming that the mating habits of the side-blotched lizard (Uta stansburiana) demonstrate a pattern similar to that seen in Rock, Paper, Scissors, according to whether the male lizard has an orange, blue, or yellow throat:

  • Orange-throated males are the largest and most aggressive lizards; they easily dominated the blue-throated lizards when competing for mates. (Orange beats blue.)

  • Similarly, blue-throated males are larger than the yellow-throated males and had no trouble fending them off. (Blue beats yellow.)

  • The yellow-throated males most closely resemble the females of the species. While the aggressive orange-throated males are fighting each other for mates, the yellow-throated males are able to slip in among the females and mate with them without being noticed. (Yellow beats orange.) They are unable to do this with the mates of the blue-throated males, because the blue-throated males form stronger bonds with their mates than the orange-throated males do, and can spot the yellow-throated males among the females.

  JUST PLANE WEIRD

  Fly the friendly skies—in complete and utter horror after you read this.

  ENGINE SCHMENGINE

  In 2005, a Los Angeles air traffic controller watched as one engine on a British Airways 747 that was taking off started on fire. “It appears you have flames coming out of your number two engine,” the tower radioed, and the pilot responded, “We’re shutting it down”—meaning the engine. Then what did he do? He continued flying, reporting his plan to “get as far as we can” toward his destination—London, England, 11 hours away. The plane, which was carrying 351 passengers, started to run out of fuel and made an emergency landing in Manchester. Officials said the pilot acted within Civil Aviation Authority guidelines. (A week later, the same plane lost an engine during a 14-hour flight from Singapore to London. That flight also carried on.)

  AMERICAN GASLINES

  Passengers aboard an American Airlines flight from Washington, D.C., in 2006 became alarmed when they smelled burning matches in the cabin. They alerted crew members and the plane made a quick emergency landing in Nashville. The plane was searched —and sure enough, burnt matches were found near the seat of a female passenger. When questioned by FBI officers, the woman admitted that she had indeed struck the matches. Why? To cover the smell of her farts. She was eventually released from custody and told that she would never again be allowed on an American Airlines flight.

  AND YOUR LITTLE DOG, TOO!

  Terry and Susan Smith of Blackburn, England, were about to take off from Manchester Airport to their new home in Lanzarote, Spain. As the plane started down the runway, they looked out the window…and saw their spotted spaniel racing down the runway alongside the plane. “We were in our seats ready for takeoff and looking forward to our new life,” said retired truck driver Terry, “when we suddenly saw Poppy on the runway.” They screamed for the plane to stop, and spent the next hour attempting to catch and calm the terrified dog. Poppy had apparently chewed her way out of her travel crate before the hatch closed. The Smiths, including Poppy, took a later flight (at a cost of about $800).

  When a male horse and female donkey mate, the offspring is called a hinny.

  CAN YOU FLY ME NOW?

  The 189 passengers seated on a plane at Doncaster Robin Hood Airport in Sheffield, England, in December 2006 were told by the captain that he had dropped his cell phone somewhere in the cockpit. And that they couldn’t take off until he found it. Why? Because it was on and, as everyone knows, you have to turn off your cell phone before takeoff. For the next 15 minutes he gave them regular updates, but he still couldn’t find the phone. Then he called the ground crew to come in to dismantle the cockpit floor…and they still couldn’t find it. After an hour the passengers had to return to the terminal. “We just couldn’t believe our ears,” one told the Sun. “We thought we’d heard every excuse in the book for delays but this one took the biscuit.” They finally left—four hours later—on another plane (with another pilot).

  GOD WAS HIS CO-PILOT

  A pilot for Sriwijaya Air in Indonesia successfully guided a 737 and its 100 passengers to a landing at Jakarta’s Sukarno-Hatta International Airport and then, with the plane still taxiing toward the terminal, the pilot died. Captain Sutikno, 54, had suffered a heart attack. The National Committee for Transport Safety launched an inquiry to investigate the incident, though the airline reported that Sutikno had no history of heart disease.

  * * *

  THE OOPS CHALLENGE

  In 2006, writer David Sklansky, an outspoken atheist, made a public challenge: he’d give any practicing Christian who could score higher than him on the SAT test a prize of $50,000. Within a day, someone accepted the challenge: 74-time Jeopardy champion (and devout Mormon) Ken Jennings.

  You are four times more likely to choke to death on a non-edible object than on food.

  KNOW YOUR PHOBIAS

  Bibliourophobia: The fear of not having something to read in the bathroom. (Okay, we made that one up. But the rest of these are real, documented phobias.)

  Peladophobia: Fear of baldness

  Alektorophobia: Fear of chickens

  Lutraphobia: Fear of otters

  Ephebiphobia: Fear of teenagers

  Amathophobia: Fear of dust

  Zemmiphobia: Fear of mole rats

  Arachibutyrophobia: Fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth

  Asymmetriphobia: Fear of asymmetry

  Aulophobia: Fear of flutes

  Chromophobia: Fear of colors

  Euphobia: Fear of hearing good news

  Cibophobia: Fear of food

  Automatonophobia: Fear of ventriloquist’s dummies

  Coprophobia: Fear of poop

  Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia: Fear of the number 666

  Consecotaleophobia: Fear of chopsticks

  Xylophobia: Fear of wooden objects

  Dextrophobia: Fear of things touching the right side of your body

  Cherophobia: Fear of happiness

  Agyrophobia: Fear of crossing the street

  Anthrophobia: Fear of flowers

  Melophobia: Fear of music

  Chronophobia: Fear of time

  Papaphobia: Fear of the Pope

  Alliumphobia: Fear of garlic

  Walloonphobia: Fear of the Walloons (an ethnic group in Belgium)

  Phobophobia: Fear of phobias

  Geniophobia: Fear of chins

  Logophobia: Fear of words

  Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia: Fear of long words

  Shaquille O’Neal wears size-22 shoes.

  THE BEST BAD WRITING

  A few years ago we discovered the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. The object: to compose the worst opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. The competition was created in the early 1980s by a literary professor named Scott Rice. Here are some of our favorite entries from the last few years.

  BUT FIRST…

  The sentence that started it all, from the 1830 novel Paul Clifford by English author Edward George Bulwer-Lytton:

  It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

  Now settle in for some modern-day longwindedness…

  • It was a dark and stormy night—actually not all that dark, but more dusky or maybe cloudy, and to say “stormy” may be overstating things a bit, although the sidewalks were still wettish and smelled of ozone, and, truth be told, characterizing the time as night is a stretch as it was more in the late, late afternoon because I think Oprah was still on.

  —Gregory Snider, MD, Lexington, KY, 2004 runner-up

  • Jack planted the magic beans and in one night a giant beanstalk grew all the way from the e
arth up to the clouds—which sounds like a lie, but it can be done with genetic engineering, and although a few people are against eating gene-engineered foods like those beans it’s a high-paying career to think about for when you grow up.

  —Frances Grimble, San Francisco, CA, 2004 Children’s Lit winner

  • On reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll gets a little squashed so it hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you can hear the rest going bumpity-bumpity in its holder until you go nuts and push it back into shape, a degree of annoyance that Angela had now almost attained.

  —Rephah Berg, Oakland, CA, 2002 winner

  Real money: Americans spend $20 billion a year on imitation fats and sugar substitutes.

  AND FINALLY…

  A few of our BRI writers decided to try their hand at a horrible sentence.

  • The weary foot soldier peered out from his squalid foxhole and saw them: a plethora of attacking aliens advancing toward him—or maybe it was a “myriad” of aliens, he thought, pondering the quantitative value of plethoras versus myriads, to and fro, until, sadly, he was instantly vaporized by what his fellow soldiers (who’d barely escaped themselves) would later describe as “a sh*tload of aliens.”

  —Jay Newman

  • He couldn’t sleep so he did what he always did when he couldn’t sleep—he thought about riding a unicorn, like the one he’d dreamt about as a child, the dream which he wasn’t totally convinced was a dream, but in actuality was a reality—then he awoke and realized he wasn’t really sleeping, but was dreaming about wanting to sleep; he thought it all terribly ironic, until, he noticed, there at the foot of his bed, was the ghost of John Quincy Adams.

  —Brian Boone

  • Staring intently across the office through the bleak October twilight, Matt eyed the empty orange-juice container that he’d “decorated” with a Sharpie to look like a jack-o-lantern face, silently hating the fact that his lame co-workers had actually entered it in the demeaning office pumpkin-decorating contest, but also secretly p*ssed off that they hadn’t won and hadn’t even gotten honorable mention for “Most Economical.”

  —G. Javna

  • Though it sickened her to think that, once again, the old men would ogle her generous hips under the voluminous corduroy skirt, and desire her supple skin, aromatic with Yardley oatmeal soap that you could only find at a Rexall pharmacy, she steeled herself, tightening her moist lips like two tiles in a badly built shower, and pushed through the door of the stamp-collectors’ shop.

  —Amy Miller

  Rats can find their way through a maze faster when Mozart’s music is being played.

  ALIENS: WHAT WILL

  THEY LOOK LIKE?

  What will the bug-eyed monsters and little green men of science fiction really look like when we meet them? According to BRI stalwart Bruce Carlson, you might want to watch where you step.

  WHO’S OUT THERE?

  Most scientists believe that there is, in fact, life beyond Earth. But they wonder whether we’ll even recognize it if—or when—we first bump into it.

  Will alien life be the cute, big-eyed, long-armed aliens in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial? Or the people-eating, egg-laying monsters in Alien? Perhaps they’ll be the big, hairy Wookies or overweight, oversexed Jabba the Hutt types from Star Wars. Or maybe they’re already here—the “grays” who occasionally kidnap people and take them away inside brightly lit UFOs, like the ones in Close Encounters of the Third Kind or The X-Files.

  The list of imaginary aliens goes on and on, but if you ask scientists what a being from another planet might actually look like, they’ll tell you that it probably isn’t going to look even remotely like anything portrayed in sci-fi movies or anything we’ve seen before. This raises questions about what life actually is, and how we’ll know it if we see it. Anna Lee Strachan of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute points out that a being with, say, “a dark matter quantum-like existence, blinking in and out of time and space, without any need for a home planet, water, or energy,” would probably be unrecognizable to us as “life.”

  WHAT TO EXPECT

  Extraterrestrials may not have backbones (or any bones at all). They may not have just one brain, or viscera packaged inside skin. They won’t necessarily be bilaterally symmetrical—having one side the same as the other—as most Earth life is. Most movie aliens have two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears, one nose, and a mouth that’s located in the front of the head. But there’s no good reason, other than movie budgets, that this should be the case.

  Wearing headphones for an hour can increase the number of bacteria in your ear by 700%.

  THE POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS

  While many scientists believe quite firmly that life does exist Out There, they say that what it looks like would depend on where it comes from. Life anywhere evolves to prosper in the environment it lives in. For example, astronomer Carl Sagan and Cornell University scientist E. E. Salpeter imagined the possibility of miles-in-diameter hydrogen balloon–type life forms floating high in the atmosphere of a giant gas planet like Jupiter and feeding on organic molecules that fall from the skies, sort of like fish food. They could just float along, controlling their buoyancy so as not to sink too low and get crushed by the gravitational pressure close to the planet’s surface.

  Life coming from a smaller, rockier planet with higher gravity would be profoundly different. Any creatures there would have to be small and extraordinarily tough, like the life forms science fiction writer Hal Clement created in his stories about a planet he called Mesklin. Unlike Sagan and Salpeter’s gossamer floaters, Clement’s Mesklinites are insectlike creatures with exoskeletons, built close to the ground, with many legs for support and powerful circulatory systems, well adapted to the strong gravitational pull.

  COMMON SENSES

  When imagining life elsewhere, scientists have to make some assumptions. They assume, for instance, that any living thing will have senses of some kind to react to its environment—it’s just that those senses might not be anything recognizable to humans. Carl Sagan once said, “The number of individually unlikely events in the evolutionary history of Man was so great that nothing like us is ever likely to evolve again anywhere else in the universe.” Aliens might “see” via radio waves or “hear” via X-rays. As physicist Philip Morrison points out, they may just be “blue spheres with 12 tentacles.”

  Life forms from elsewhere may not be carbon-based, as life on Earth is. Many scientists assume they will be, however, because carbon is very good at knitting together chemical chains—acting as a sort of glue for the pieces of life’s complex molecules. But still, there are other chemicals that can do that, too. Silicon is often mentioned as a possible base for alien life, because it’s a versatile element that combines readily with chemical chains. And depending on the organic groups attached, the result can be solid, fluid, or resinous.

  So, too, might be the aliens.

  Liquid air (below –190°C) looks like water with a bluish tint.

  HOWDY, NEIGHBOR

  There may even be extraterrestrial life within our own solar system. Most astrobiologists are of the opinion that, if there is, it won’t be the monstrous, mechanized Martians of War of the Worlds. Instead it will be tiny microbes. And if Jupiter’s moon Europa does have oceans of liquid beneath its icy surface, as some scientists believe, then that’s one place to look. While some experts hold out hope for something as sophisticated as a worm—there are worms, for example, at the cold, dark bottom of the Pacific Ocean—most put their money on some sort of floating blob of goo. No brains, no arms or legs, no spaceships, no communicators, no phaser guns…just microscopic slime that spends its time eating, excreting, and reproducing.

  In December 1984, ALH84001, a Martian meteorite, was discovered in Antarctica. Scientists thought it contained evidence of extraterrestrial life, including organic chemicals and “bacterium
-shaped objects.” Later studies showed that much of the evidence might well have come from what are called “nonbiological processes,” which diminished the excitement a bit. But scientists are still studying it…and who knows what they’ll find?

  DON’T YOU RECOGNIZE ME?

  So the next time you watch a science-fiction movie or TV show, keep in mind that real aliens will most likely look less like ETs and more like…well, like nothing we’ve ever seen. The best way to consider what extraterrestrials will look like is to do what astrobiologists do: Get your facts straight. Then stretch your imagination.

  * * *

  DOCTOR, DOCTOR

  Over the past 20 years, several Brazilians have claimed that their bodies are inhabited by the soul of “Dr. Fritz,” a German doctor who served and died in World War I. Today, Dr. Fritz is said to live inside a man named Rubens Faria, Jr. Every day, more than 800 people wait in line for a 30-second healing session with Faria/Fritz.

  The world’s shortest escalator is at a shopping mall in Japan. It has a vertical height of 2'8".

  WEIRD CANADA

  We couldn’t do a world tour of the odd without a stop up north, eh.

  KIM CAMPBELL MEETS SIMON COWELL

  In 1995, Canada started a national essay-writing scholarship contest called “As Prime Minister.” In 2006, it became a reality TV show called The Next Great Prime Minister. For the 2007 installment, the finalists will be judged by a panel of former prime ministers: Brian Mulroney, John Turner, Joe Clark, and Kim Campbell. (Interestingly, the winner doesn’t get to be prime minister—they get $44,000 and a government internship.)

  WAITING FOR MOMMY

  Roxanne Toussaint, a single mother of three, felt unappreciated for the hard work she does cooking, cleaning, and raising her kids. So in 2006, she went on strike. She moved into a tent on her front lawn and spends the day holding up a sign that reads “Mom on Strike.” Toussaint’s demands: that her kids sign a pledge to clean up their rooms, contribute to the housework, and be quieter.