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

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  Story: In September 2009, sunbathers at Madiera Beach, Florida, saw Marriott, 41, as he seemed to be struggling in the surf. When they ran into the water to save him, he jumped up and started throwing jellyfish at them. Witnesses said he repeated the stunt several times, each time throwing jellyfish at people who ran to help him. He was arrested and charged with disorderly intoxication.

  Thrower: Crystal Samuel of Manning, South Carolina

  Thrown: A waffle

  Story: Samuel and some friends were waiting for a takeout order at a Waffle House restaurant early one morning in May 2009. Her friends got their meals, but Samuel was still waiting, so her friends started eating. A waitress told the group that they couldn’t eat from takeout containers in the restaurant. Samuel explained that she didn’t have her food yet, but the waitress told her they all had to leave. An argument ensued—and Samuel threw a waffle at the waitress. They both went outside, and the waitress walked to her car…and took out a gun and shot Samuel in the arm. The waitress, Yakeisha Ward, was charged with assault and battery with intent to kill. Samuel told reporters she thought the incident showed that the restaurant had “bad customer service.”

  Throwers: Three police officers in Gainesville, Florida

  Thrown: Eggs

  Story: One night in November 2008, three off-duty cops were out drinking until around 2:00 a.m. when they decided to do something stupid: They went to a convenience store, bought four dozen eggs, and drove to a part of town known to have a high concentration of prostitutes and drug dealers. The cops then cruised the streets and threw eggs at people. They were finally pulled over by another off-duty cop, who recognized them because he’d pulled them over once before—for doing the same thing. After an investigation, the officers were given a written warning. (The citizens of Gainesville can sleep soundly now.)

  * * *

  Every year Americans use enough plastic wrap to cover the entire state of Texas.

  * * *

  Thrower: William Singalargh of Whakatane, New Zealand

  Thrown: A hedgehog

  Story: Singalargh, 27, was arrested in June 2008 after getting into an argument with a 15-year-old boy. During the confrontation, Singalargh reportedly grabbed a hedgehog (no word on where he got it) and threw it at the kid. The porcupine-like creature struck the boy’s leg, causing several punctures and severe swelling. Singalargh was fined $500 for simple assault—the original charge of assault with a deadly weapon was dropped when the hedgehog was determined “not deadly enough.”

  Thrower: Andrew Mizsak Jr. of Bedford, Ohio

  Thrown: A plate of food

  Story: In May 2008, Mizsak and his father, Andrew Sr., got into an argument at the dinner table over young Andrew’s messy bedroom. The junior Mizsak threw a plate of food across the table and “made a fist” at his father when he was told to clean it up—and the father called 911 on him. But when police arrived, the senior Mizsak told them that he didn’t want to press charges against his son. Why? “I don’t want to ruin his political career,” he said. Andrew Mizsak Jr., who was a member of the Bedford school board, was 28 years old and lived in his parents’ basement. “I know this looks bad,” Mizsak Jr. told reporters.

  Thrower: Douglas Jones, 57, of La Quinta, California

  Thrown: Golf balls, tennis balls, and cans of fruits and vegetables

  Story: In 2007 park rangers in Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California began finding golf balls near roads in the park—lots of golf balls. It continued for more than two years, during which between 2,000 and 3,000 balls were found. In August 2009, rangers finally solved the mystery when someone spotted Douglas Jones throwing golf balls out of his car as he drove through the park. Jones immediately confessed, saying that he threw the balls to “leave his mark” and to honor deceased golfers. Park rangers said that Jones also threw cans of food, which he claimed were intended for people who became stranded. He was cited for abandoning property, littering—and unauthorized feeding of wildlife.

  * * *

  In 2005 North Korea launched an ad campaign telling men to cut their hair The campaign’s slogan: “Trim Our Hair According to Socialist Lifestyle.”

  * * *

  Thrower: Taesani

  Thrown: A rock

  Story: A woman identified only as Ms. Kim went to a South Korean police station in 2009 to report that someone had thrown a rock at her. Who threw it? Taesani, an elephant at a Seoul zoo. Kim told officers that on a trip to the zoo, she’d noticed the elephant picking up a stone with its trunk, didn’t think much about it, turned around—and felt the rock suddenly hit the back of her head. Police investigated the incident, but there were no witnesses, and it happened outside the view of surveillance cameras. No charges were filed against the elephant.

  TWO CRAZY PRODUCTS

  Julie Jackson from Dallas, Texas (who once worked as an intern on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood) invented two products that have us scratching our heads (and our cats’ heads, too).

  • Subversive Cross-Stitch Kits—$20: They look just like the sweet embroidery samplers that Grandma used to make, except these kits (fabric, thread, pattern, embroidery hoop, and two needles) lets you make cross-stitch patterns that spell out vulgar messages, including “Homo Sweet Homo” and “Shut Your Whore Mouth.”

  • Wigs for Cats—$50: As presented in her book Glamourpuss: The Enchanting World of Kitty Wigs, Jackson (along with photographer Jill Johnson and her Siamese cat, Boone) show off the many colors and styles of cat wigs. You can choose from Pink Passion, Bashful Blonde, Electric Blue, and Silver Fox.

  Both of Jackson’s products have been huge sellers.

  PANTS ON FIRE

  These people can’t handle the truth!

  CRIME SPREE

  A Panama City Beach, Florida, man called 911 from a store in 2009 and said that he’d been robbed: He was getting into his car after leaving the store, he said, when a man “dressed in black” hit him and took $100 in cash from him. Police watched the store’s surveillance video and saw the “victim” walk out of the store, sit in his car for a while, then go back inside to call 911. When confronted, the man admitted he lied…because he was afraid to tell his wife that he’d spent the $100. He was arrested.

  SURE, THAT WILL WORK

  In August 2009, more than 100 friends and family of cancer patient Trista Joy Lathern, 24, held a benefit in her honor at a tavern in Waco, Texas. They raised more than $10,000 for her…and she used the money to get breast-augmentation surgery. Lathern had lied to her family and friends about having cancer (she even shaved her head so she’d look like she’d undergone cancer treatment). When the hoax was found out, Lathern told police she wanted the boob job…in order to save her marriage. Her husband filed for divorce shortly after her arrest.

  A DAY OFF (FROM THINKING)

  Aaron Siebers, 29, of Denver, Colorado, used a small knife to stab himself in the legs, arms, and upper body one day in November 2009. He then called police and said that he’d been attacked by three men who were either Hispanic…or possibly skinheads. Police questioned his story, and Siebers finally admitted that he’d faked the attack. Why? Because he didn’t want to go to his job at a video store. He was arrested.

  SHE’S A LIAR (WHEW!)

  A woman wearing a bandanna over her face posted a video on an Internet site in January 2010 in which she claimed that she had HIV/AIDS—and that she had infected more than 500 men in Detroit, Michigan, with the disease. And, she said, she planned to infect more, because she wanted to “destroy the world.” Within a few days, more than half a million people had watched the video. Detroit police were able to quickly identify the woman: Jackie Braxton, 23, a Detroit adult-film actress. After she was arrested, she admitted to making the video—and said it was a hoax. (She volunteered to take an HIV test, and it came back negative.) Braxton said she started the hoax to raise awareness about AIDS. Police decided she had not committed a crime.

  Bonus: Braxton apparently did raise awareness in Detroit: Mic
hael McElrath, a spokesman for the city’s health department, said that after the video went viral, the number of men who went to clinics for HIV testing in Detroit more than doubled.

  * * *

  In the U.K., it’s considered treason to place a postage stamp bearing the Queen’s image upside down.

  * * *

  WHO ARE THESE GUYS?

  A customer walked into Goomba’s Pizzeria in Palm Coast, Florida, in 2009 and demanded his money back: His calzone, he said, hadn’t been made properly. The owner of the pizzeria jumped over the counter and pistol-whipped the customer. Police were called, and the restaurant’s owner, Joseph Milano, was arrested. The victim, Richard Phinney, was taken to the hospital. A few weeks later, police learned that Joseph Milano wasn’t really Joseph Milano; his name was actually Joseph Calco—and he was a New York mobster who was in the Witness Protection Program. He was supposed to be lying low—and it was illegal for him to have a gun. Calco was arrested.

  Bonus: A few weeks after finding out that Milano had lied about his identity, police found out that the victim, Richard Phinney, had lied about his, too—when the real Richard Phinney came forward and reported that his identity had been stolen. The victim’s real name: Jack Kilburne, who was wanted for failure to pay child support. He was also arrested.

  “Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces.”

  —Marcel Proust

  * * *

  The “naked recreation and travel” industry has grown by 233% in the past decade.

  * * *

  JUST PLANE WEIRD

  Crazy tales of flying high—and not flying at all.

  HIGH FLYIN’

  The control tower at a small airport in Schoengleida, Germany, received a perplexing call over the radio in September 2009: “Where the bloody hell have you hidden yourself?” the pilot demanded. When the controller asked the pilot to identify himself, he replied only with, “Come on, I know you’re down there!” It took a few more questions to determine that the 65-year-old Cessna pilot had had several drinks before taking off and was still drinking while he was flying. The controllers dispatched a rescue helicopter to find him and guide him to the runway. During the search, the pilot sang songs, told a mother-in-law joke, and urged them to hurry up because he had a party to go to. The helicopter finally found the inebriated pilot, who sang more songs as he followed it home. He actually made a decent landing, but then stumbled out of his plane and drove away. Airport authorities alerted police, who caught him a few miles later. He’s been banned from driving a car or flying a plane ever again.

  FLYING FRACAS

  In 2009 a fistfight broke out in the cockpit of an Indian Airlines flight bound for New Delhi and then spilled out into the main cabin. According to witnesses, the male co-pilot, a male purser, and a female flight attendant were “slugging it out” in front of everyone. The purser was apparently defending the honor of the flight attendant, who’d complained that the co-pilot had tried to hold her hand. When she refused, he pushed her into the cockpit door “with such force that she started bleeding.” The purser said that the pilots became abusive when he confronted them. The pilots later blamed the fight on the purser. An airline official called the incident “shocking.”

  WOULD YOU GET ON BOARD?

  “People got off the plane and were kissing the ground and praying. There were little girls sobbing.” That was the scene described by one of the passengers preparing to board a Thomas Cook Airlines plane on the Spanish island of Mallorca in 2009. Making the London-bound passengers even more nervous: the announcement instructing them to disregard their seat assignments and crowd together in the back of the plane. (The jet’s rear loading door was jammed, and their luggage could only be stored in the front cargo bay.) The final straw: As the arriving passengers walked into the airport, several warned, “Don’t get on that plane! It was the worst flight ever!” Not wanting to act as ballast, 71 people refused to board and booked flights on other airlines. The remaining passengers had a rough but otherwise uneventful flight to London.

  * * *

  Scholars are now using plagiarism-detection software to confirm the authors of historic works.

  * * *

  GROUNDED

  A wingless Boeing 737 got stuck in traffic on a crowded street in Mumbai, India, in 2007. How’d it get there? The decommissioned plane was being towed to New Delhi when the truck driver took a wrong turn. A low bridge blocked the way, and the road was too narrow for the truck to turn around. So the driver got out, walked off, and didn’t return. The massive fuselage sat on the busy street for the rest of the day…and the next day, and the day after that. Local business owners complained that the behemoth was blocking access to their shops; others appreciated all of the tourists who came out to gawk at it. A week later, in the middle of the night, it disappeared. There was no official word on who finally took the plane, or where it ended up.

  WAKE-UP CALL?

  For 79 tense minutes, air traffic controllers couldn’t make contact with a Northwest Airlines jet carrying 144 passengers from San Diego to Minneapolis in 2009. Fearing the worst, the military readied fighter jets to intercept the plane. After the airliner had overshot its destination by 150 miles, the captain finally radioed to traffic controllers that everyone onboard was okay. The tower asked, “Do you have time to give a brief explanation of what happened?” “Just cockpit distractions,” said the pilot. “That’s all I can say.” So what did happen up there? After the plane landed safely, the pilots claimed they’d been going over scheduling issues on their laptops and lost track of the time. Aviation experts were skeptical; one said it was “more plausible that the pilots had fallen asleep.”

  * * *

  Bad car-ma: When exposed to traffic noise, zebra finches are more likely to cheat on their mates.

  * * *

  SCIENCE ON THE EDGE

  Bicycles that pedal for you, robot fish, crime-fighting leeches—the world of science has it all.

  THIS FISH TASTES FUNNY

  In 2009 computer and electronic engineering scientists at the University of Essex in England announced that they’d created a new kind of fish: a robotic one. The faux fish are about five feet long and look and swim like real fish—so they won’t scare real fish—and are fitted with complex sensors that detect hazardous pollutants in water, such as oil from a leaking ship or pipeline. They’re set to be released for a test run in 2011 in the port of Gijon, Spain, where they will swim around, gathering information that will be sent to a control station via wi-fi technology. The robots are even programmed to return to “charging areas” every eight hours to get their batteries recharged. If the test run is successful, robo-fish may soon be swimming in rivers, lakes, and oceans all over the world.

  THE LEECH OF YOUR WORRIES

  In 2001 two men broke into the home of 71-year-old Fay Olsen on the Australian island of Tasmania, tied her to a chair, “poked her with sticks,” and robbed her of $550 ($504 U.S.). Police found no evidence at the scene except for a leech—fully engorged with blood from a recent meal—on the floor. Officers checked the woman and themselves for signs that the leech had been attached to one of them, and determined that it must have fallen off one of the robbers. DNA samples were taken from the blood in the leech. Seven years passed. In 2008 a 56-year-old Tasmanian man was arrested on drug charges and a routine DNA sample was taken from him and cross-checked against a database. It matched the DNA taken from the leech. Peter Alec Cannon eventually confessed to the seven-year-old crime and was sentenced to two years in prison. (His accomplice was never apprehended.) Tasmanian police said that, to their knowledge, it was the first time DNA from a leech had assisted in solving a crime anywhere in the world.

  * * *

  For sale on eBay in 2004: Britney Spears’s chewed gum, used Kleenex, and used bar of soap.

  * * *

  WHEEL TAKE IT

  At the Copenhagen Climate Change conference in D
ecember 2009, engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced the release of their “Copenhagen Wheel”—a bicycle wheel they hope will revolutionize bike riding around the world. Features: When you’re pushing hard on the pedals to go uphill, sensors activate a small, powerful motor in the wheel’s hub to help you along. And the battery that powers the motor is constantly being recharged as you ride. In addition, the wheel communicates, via wireless Bluetooth technology, with an iPhone application on the handlebars to let you know your speed, direction, distance traveled—even traffic and smog conditions. Best of all: You can just buy the wheel—it fits on virtually any bike.

  HEADS OR HELMETS

  Which is safer: riding a bike with or without a helmet? It might not be as clear as you think. Dr. Ian Walker of England’s University of Bath published the results of a 2007 study in the journal Accident Analysis & Prevention. Walker, an avid cyclist, fitted his bicycle with sensors that could detect how close cars came to him as they passed him, then rode through the city for a couple of months—with and without his helmet on. During that time, he was passed by more than 2,300 cars. Result: Overall, cars, trucks, and buses passed his bike at a distance of about four feet. But drivers passed 3.35 inches closer, on average, when he wore his helmet than when he didn’t. “This study shows that when drivers pass a cyclist,” Walker wrote, “the margin for error they leave is affected by the cyclist’s appearance.” The reason, Walker says, is probably because drivers feel more comfortable when passing a helmeted biker rather than a helmetless one, so they may actually be more dangerous to bikers wearing helmets. (Statistics, it must be noted, still show that non-helmeted bikers are much more likely to be seriously injured or killed in an accident.)