Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  —Linda Blair, star of The Exorcist

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  Celeb phobia: Cameron Diaz is grossed out by doorknobs. She won’t touch them with her bare hands.

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  THE TOURIST OF DEATH

  Here’s a recipe for an Internet phenomenon: Begin with a major disaster, create an improbable image that cuts to the core of the disaster, and then distribute the image to a stunned and gullible public.

  INBOX HORROR

  Were you one of the millions of people who were e-mailed this photograph in the weeks after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001? A young man wearing a black ski coat and knit cap is standing on the observation deck of the World Trade Center with Manhattan in the background. Behind him, a jet airliner is flying straight for the building, just seconds away from crashing into the floors below. The date stamp on the bottom right corner: “9-11-01.”

  By telling two conflicting stories—the blissfully ignorant tourist, and the hijacked plane that was about to take his life—the image perfectly captured the sense of security and complacency that Americans felt before the terrorists shattered it and “changed everything.” The caption on the photo drove home the point even more:

  This picture was from a camera found in the wreckage of the WTC, developed by the FBI for evidence and released on the net today. The guy still has no name and is missing. Makes you see things from a very different position. Please share this and find any way you can to help Americans not to be victims in the future of such cowardly attacks.

  WAIT A SECOND

  The photo was convincing enough at first…until people took a closer look at it. Why was the tourist wearing a coat and hat when the attack took place on a warm summer morning? Why was he on the observation deck a half-hour before it opened? Why was the plane in the photo coming from the north, when it actually approached from the south? Oh, and why was it the wrong kind of plane? But those inconsistencies didn’t slow it down. According to columnist J. Scott Wilson: “In one day, I received no less than 150 copies of it from various readers, friends, and acquaintances. Despite the numerous impossibilities present in the photo, folks just seemed to accept it at face value.”

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  YouTube streams as much data in three months as the world’s radios and televisions stream in a year.

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  But not everyone. Many wanted to know: Who was this guy? Who manipulated the photo? And why?

  But before any answers were found, the image took on a life of its own all over the Internet. Several Web sites sprang up, such as TouristOfDeath.com and TheTouristGuy.com, featuring shots of “Waldo” (as he came to be known) showing up in other photos of historic disasters. There he was, posing in front of the Hindenburg as it went down in flames! And then in Tokyo, while Godzilla laid waste to the city! And there he was back on the World Trade Center, but now, instead of a plane, he’s about to be done in by the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters!

  WHODUNIT?

  All the hype and spin-offs only added to the mystery of who this man in the photo really was. Over the next few weeks, commentators and pundits alike blamed everyone from bored students at MIT, to a “true-blooded American” attempting to stir up patriotism, to Osama Bin Laden sympathizers who wanted to gloat. And then, in early November, a 41-year-old Brazilian businessman named José Roberto Penteado sent an e-mail to Wired News: “I believe that some friends planted my face onto that body.” He said he’d never even been to New York and couldn’t explain why someone would do it, but the guy in the photo looked just like him.

  Penteado became an instant celebrity. He appeared on several Brazilian talk shows and was featured in news stories all over the world. People approached him on the street and asked for his autograph, and Volkswagen’s Brazilian subsidiary offered to buy the rights to the image from him and put it in a series of TV commercials. Suddenly, Penteado stood to profit…for doing absolutely nothing at all.

  There was one problem, though: Although he resembled the Tourist of Death, why didn’t he have the original photo that his head was lifted from? And why was his jaw wider than the Tourist of Death’s? And, when people really scrutinized it, Penteado’s face appeared to have a different shape altogether.

  Meanwhile, halfway around the world in Hungary, a group of friends knew for certain that Penteado was a fake, because they knew who the real fake was.

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  Strip aerobics, punk aerobics, and antigravity yoga are all fitness fads.

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  EXPOSED

  Back in November 1997, a 21-year-old man named Peter Guzli from Budapest, Hungary, had taken a vacation to New York City. While sightseeing, his buddy snapped a few shots of him on top of the WTC. Nearly four years later, shortly after the attacks occurred, Guzli found himself drawn to that picture folder. On a lark, he searched online and found an image of a plane (which was actually sitting on a tarmac in Houston, Texas, when the photo was taken) and then used Photoshop to cut the plane out of the picture and superimpose it over the background of his vacation shot. He added the fake time stamp and sent it to a few friends as a joke…never expecting that one of them would send it to his friends, who then sent it to their friends, and so on, and so on.

  The more famous his doctored image became, the less Guzli wanted anything to do with it. He knew that a lot of shell-shocked Americans would take offense at his attempt at dark humor. But then, when Penteado’s fame began to spread, Guzli’s friends urged him to come forward and claim the money for the VW commercial himself. Guzli refused, so his friends decided to do it for him. Two months after the picture first went viral, images with and without the plane were posted onto a Hungarian news site. From there, the mainstream press got hold of the pictures, and the Tourist of Death finally had a name.

  STAYING OUT OF DANGER

  When Guzli was pressed for an explanation, he admitted that he “didn’t have sleepless nights” over the incident, “but I certainly didn’t want people to point their fingers at me on the street. I don’t think this thing has to do with empathy or the lack of it. The people I intended it for all said they had a great laugh. That’s all.” When asked if he planned to profit from his fame, Guzli said he’d think about it. But after Volkswagen withdrew their offer (apparently realizing how tacky it would be to profit from such a horrific event), Guzli happily went back to anonymity.

  But that picture—recently named by several publications as one of the most powerful images of the 2000s—will live on in infamy, along with its hundreds of silly variations.

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  The Iraq Tourism Board recently sent delegates to London. Goal: To market Iraq as a vacation spot.

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  ABNORMAL ACTIVISTS

  Most protests are pretty dull: A group of people march somewhere, hold up signs, and yell things, and maybe the police come. We set out to find demonstrators who have a little more pizzazz—ones crazy enough to squirt a cop with milk straight from the cow.

  PINK DAWN

  The Problem: For seven years, a two-story-tall pink flamingo (made of chicken wire and pink bedsheets) attached to an outside wall above the Cafe Hon in Baltimore, Maryland, was a local attraction. But in October 2009, cafe owner Denise Whiting was surprised to get a notice from the city saying that she would be charged an annual fee of $800 because she didn’t have a permit for the large outdoor display. Whiting was furious: “It really has become a hallmark of Baltimore.” Instead of paying the fee, Whiting removed the flamingo. Citizens and business owners were outraged that the city would crack down so hard on such a favorite local landmark. Then DJs at a local radio station, 98 Rock, got an idea.

  The Protest: On the rainy morning of October 27, workers arriving at City Hall were greeted by hundreds of fake pink flamingos sticking up out of the lawn “in silent protest.”

  Did It Work? With a crowd gathering outside, Mayor Sheila Dixon went out to the flamingo field and talked to Whiting. The mayor agreed to reduce the fee to $400
and promised to promote local businesses with new signs on the freeway. Whiting paid the fee and, a few weeks later, built a new giant flamingo—this time made of fiberglass. Said Mayor Dixon: “I hope that Flamingogate will now be behind us.”

  A DROP IN THE BUCKET

  The Problem: European dairy farmers’ operating costs have been steadily rising in recent years. But with supplies up and demand down, they’ve had to sell their dairy products at lower prices. For years farmers have been pressing the European Union Farm Commission to set minimum prices, but their requests have been repeatedly denied.

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  Danish farmers track and monitor their cows using CowDetect radio frequency tags.

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  The Protest: In October 2009, more than 2,500 farmers drove their tractors to EU headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, and dumped millions of gallons of milk and thousands of pounds of eggs and manure into the streets. Armored police arrived and formed a riot line to push the protesters back. During the struggle, one angry farmer grabbed one of his cows’ udders, pointed a teat at the police, squeezed, and sprayed milk at them (it traveled an impressive 15 feet). The cops blocked the milk with their riot shields, but the cow broke free from the farmer’s grasp and chased a bystander down the sidewalk. It took the efforts of several farmers and police officers to apprehend the cow. Meanwhile, the protest continued.

  Did It Work? So far, no. The EU Farm Commission insists that it can’t control how much foodsellers charge. Expect more milk protests in the future.

  600 CHEEKS AGREE

  The Problem: In summer 2009, citizens in the Canadian town of Sarnia, on the shore of Lake Huron, were outraged to see, day after day, a large, wing-shaped balloon floating 1,000 feet above the lake. The balloon, which was monitored by a U.S. defense contractor, carried a surveillance camera capable of reading the name of a boat from nine miles away. According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, it was only there to monitor shipping traffic. Sarnia’s citizens, including the mayor, complained to the Canadian government that it was an invasion of their privacy. “The U.S. has no right to spy on us!” said one local. But there was little the Canadian government could do because, technically, the balloon was hovering over U.S. waters.

  The Protest: An estimated 300 Sarnians decided to make a statement that their government couldn’t: They marched down to the waterfront, dropped their pants, and mooned the balloon.

  Did It Work? The mooning turned out to be a moot point, since the balloon wasn’t even in the sky that day (it had been knocked down by a storm a week earlier). But protesters agreed that baring their behinds was a “symbolic measure.” And after the balloon was repaired, it was relocated…to the skies above Afghanistan.

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  Better not to think about it? Lasagna comes from the Latin word for “chamber pot.”

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  THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF CHANGE

  The Problem: In 2006 the German power company E.ON announced plans to build a coal-fired power plant in the English town of Kingsnorth. Despite charges that the plant would “emit more greenhouse gases than the entire country of Ghana,” construction crews got to work, with a planned completion date of 2012. As part of a public-relations campaign, E.ON built a small-scale Lego replica of the plant in the Legoland theme park in Windsor, England. Right near the Lego Big Ben and Lego Westminster Abbey, the Lego model of the power plant stood four feet high, and its giant smokestack even emitted steam.

  The Protests: On July 8, 2008, museum attendees were surprised to see six tiny Lego protesters “climbing” the smokestack, followed by the unrolling of a banner from the top of the power plant that read “Stop Climate Change.” Tiny Lego police dotted the scene around the smokestack, along with a Lego police helicopter.

  The museum wasn’t the only place activists infiltrated that day; all over the U.K., thousands of people gathered to protest against the power company and the government. Naked environmentalists (real people) scaled the walls of E.ON’s corporate offices, a group blockaded a biofuel depot in Essex, and dozens of activists lay down in a pool of oil in front of the Royal Bank of Scotland to stage a “die-in.”

  Did It Work? Maybe. A year later, E.ON announced that the power plant would be delayed until 2016. It wasn’t due to the protests, said a company spokesman, but because “electricity demand has fallen during the global recession.”

  SLAVES TO FASHION

  The Problem: Sir Phillip Green is one of England’s richest men, thanks to TopShop, his successful chain of retail clothing stores. According to a 2007 article in London’s Times Online, “Factories owned by Green, worth nearly £5 billion, employ hundreds of Sri Lankan, Indian, and Bangladeshi workers in Mauritius, where they labor for up to 12 hours a day, six days a week.” Reportedly, the workers were paid only a few cents per day.

  The Protest: On December 5, 2008, dozens of activists wearing Santa Claus suits marched to the front of TopShop’s flagship store in London. There, they treated holiday shoppers to “A TopShop Christmas Carol,” a skit that parodied the Dickens classic, with Green as Scrooge. The real Green tried to have the protest disrupted, but the police let the show continue. After the play, the Santas, carrying heavy sacks and signs reading “End Slave Labor,” marched to TopShop’s corporate headquarters and dumped the contents of the sacks—thousands of signatures from people urging Green to treat his workforce more fairly.

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  If your tongue were as long as a nectar bat’s (proportionally speaking) you’d be able to lick your toes while standing

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  Did It Work? Not really. Green claimed that he would “address the matter,” but he has repeatedly refused to join the Ethical Trading Initiative, an “an alliance of companies, trade unions, and voluntary organizations working in partnership to improve the lives of workers across the globe.”

  EAT YOUR HEART OUT

  The Problem: In 2009 the European Union imposed a ban on importing most Canadian seal products on the grounds that Inuit hunters, who provided the raw material, were “inhumanely killing seals.” The Inuits claimed that they’d been humanely—and sustainably—killing seals for thousands of years. Joining in the debate was Michaëlle Jean, who served as Canada’s Governor General, a largely ceremonial position appointed by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II. Many wondered whether she would side with Europe or with Canada.

  The Protest: Jean made a surprise appearance at an Inuit community festival in Rankin Inlet, Nunavut. With cameras rolling, “Her Excellency” brandished a traditional Inuit ulu blade, crouched over a freshly killed seal, and began to skin it. Then she pulled out a chunk of the seal’s heart, held it up for all to see…and took a bite out of it. “It tastes like sushi,” she said.

  Did It Work? The European Union upheld the ban. When asked to comment about whether Jean’s gesture had helped or hurt the Inuits’ cause, an EU spokesperson said it was “too bizarre to acknowledge.”

  “Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.”

  —Thomas Hardy

  STAIRWAY TO WEIRD

  There’s a lady who’s weird / all that glitters is weird / and she’s weirding a stairway / to weirrrrrd…

  STAIRS: A woman in Queensland, Australia, called police in August 2009: An angry cow had climbed the stairs to her front door and was attempting to get into her house. Police went to the woman’s home and made the cow mooove along.

  STAIRS: Naeema Screven of New York City was hurrying to get to her subway train in 2008 when she ran down an “up” staircase. A transit cop stopped her, pepper-sprayed her, put her in handcuffs, arrested her, and took her to jail. Screven sued the city for $3 million. The “Down the Up Staircase Case” is still pending.

  STAIRS: An Italian man was headed to his 40th high school reunion in the city of Trieste when his car’s satellite navigation system told him to make a right turn. He did—right down a staircase. The car bounced down two flights of steps before final
ly coming to a halt. A special tow truck had to be brought in to pull the car back up to the road, and, 90 minutes later, the man finally made it to his reunion (with a really funny story to tell).

  STAIRS: In 2009 an exercise promotion team sponsored by Volkswagen installed pressure sensors—to produce musical notes—on a staircase next to the escalator in a subway station in Stockholm, Sweden. They also painted the steps black and white to make them look like piano keys. Result: the number of people who used the musical stairs rather than the escalator increased by 66 percent. (And the number of “chopsticks” related homicides increased by 400 percent. Kidding.)

  STAIRS: Chinese media reported in 2006 that an elderly couple was discovered living in a cave in a mountain range in south-central China. They’d lived there in almost complete seclusion for more than 50 years. The husband had carved a staircase into the mountainside, the story said, to make it easier for his wife to get up and down the mountain. There are more than 6,000 steps in it. It had taken him decades to construct.

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  Annual cost of untreated mental illness in the United States: more than $100 billion.

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  CLERGY GONE WILD

  Five priests, two pastors, a nun, and a rabbi all walk into a Bathroom Reader article…and bring shame to their respective faiths.