Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  HE CAUGHT A BULLET

  Plaxico Burress was a star wide receiver for the New York Giants who caught the game-winning pass in the 2008 Super Bowl. Later that year, Burress went to the New York City nightclub LQ. He brought along a large Glock handgun, which he hid by tucking it into the waistband of his jeans rather than using a holster. At one point, the gun started to slip down his leg, and when Burress went to reach for it, he accidentally pulled the trigger and shot himself in the right thigh. Burress sought medical treatment and then turned himself in to the NYPD. Not only had he injured himself, he’d committed a crime—the gun was unlicensed. Burress had a license to carry a concealed handgun, but only in Florida, and it had expired. He pleaded guilty to weapons charges and was sentenced to two years in prison.

  METALHEAD

  In November 2002, Portland Trailblazers star Damon Stoudamire skipped the team jet for a return trip home after a game in Seattle, opting to drive himself the 150 miles home. With teammate Rasheed Wallace in the car, Stoudamire’s Humvee was stopped by police. Not only was he speeding along at more than 80 mph, he also had the windows rolled down, and marijuana smoke was billowing out of them. Stoudamire was charged with driving under the influence and speeding, and he paid a fine. In July 2003, Stoudamire was again in possession of marijuana, but had the foresight to at least try and hide it from the authorities this time. So before he boarded his flight from Tucson, Arizona, to New Orleans, he carefully wrapped his stash in tin foil and put it in his carry-on luggage. The foil set off a metal detector, and Stoudamire was detained by airport security. He paid $250,000 in fines and was suspended by the NBA for three months.

  According to NASA, the U.S. has the world’s most violent weather, with 10,000 thunderstorms and 5,000 floods every year.

  HOW TO CRACK A SAFE

  Grandpa Uncle John has an old safe in his garage that he says doesn’t contain any valuables, but nobody knows for sure…because he lost the combination years ago. That raises an interesting question: How do safecrackers open safes? Read on as we bust the story wide open.

  COMBINATION SAFES 101 To understand how a locksmith or a safecracker opens a safe, it helps to first understand a few things about how a combination lock works:

  • The numbered dial is mounted on a shaft that extends inside the door of the safe, where it connects to a mechanism called a “wheel pack.”

  • The wheel pack is so named because it is literally just that: a pack of free-spinning wheels, one for each number in the combination of the safe. If there are three numbers in the combination, say, 17–76–42, then there are three wheels in the wheel pack: one for the 17, one for the 76, and one for the 42.

  • Imagine a cookie with a bite taken out of it. Each wheel in the wheel pack has a bite or notch taken out of it that corresponds to its number in the combination of the safe. In this example, the first wheel will have a notch at position #17, the second wheel at position #76, and the third wheel at position #42.

  • Opening the safe requires rotating each of the wheels until the notches line up. That’s what you’re doing when you enter the combination. If you enter it correctly, the notches line up, and the safe will open. If you enter any other combination, the notches do not line up, and the safe won’t open.

  PLAYING IT SAFE

  The first thing any skilled, experienced safecracker will try to do is find a way to not put their skill and experience to work. Nobody wants to find out how much it costs to have a locksmith open a safe, and one way that a lot of people try to prevent such a disaster is by writing down the combination and hiding it somewhere—often in the room where the safe is located. So the first thing the locksmith or safecracker will do is search any obvious hiding places for the combination. If they’re really lucky (and the owner of the safe is really dumb) the combination will be written somewhere nearby or even right on the safe.

  • Another bad habit common among safe owners is to set a safe on what’s known as “day lock.” They enter all but the last number of the combination at the start of the day, so that when something is needed from the safe only the last number of the combination has to be entered. If a safecracker suspects that the safe has been left in day lock, they will turn the dial slowly from one number to the next, looking for the final number in the combination that opens the safe.

  • Safes are sold with sample “tryout” combinations that allow customers to try the safe out in the store. After you buy the safe, you or your locksmith are supposed to change the tryout combination to something else. But not everyone bothers to do this, or even knows that they should. So the next thing a skilled locksmith or safecracker will do is try all the industry-standard try-out combinations to see if any of them opens the safe.

  PLAN B

  If none of the easy ways works, the locksmith has to start trying more difficult methods. One brute-force technique that works on antique safes is to knock the combination dial off the safe with a hammer, then use a tool called a punch rod to punch the wheel pack out of position. Once the wheel pack is knocked out of the way, the safe will usually open. But this technique works only on antique safes, whose value is often greater than anything that might be contained inside. Modern safe manufacturers incorporate a variety of “relocking” devices into their safes that render them unopenable if someone tries to punch their way through the lock.

  So what about using stethoscopes to open

  safes and all that other Hollywood stuff?

  There’s more on page 303.

  Good news? Kids eat more Play-doh than crayons, finger paint, and paste combined.

  DUSTBIN OF HISTORY:

  THOMAS MEAGHER

  Only two things are certain in life: 1) one day you’re born, and 2) one day you’re going to die. How much you pack in between those two days is up to you. Here’s a brief biography of a man who packed in a lot.

  Thomas Francis Meagher (pronounced mahr) was born on August 3, 1823, in Waterford City, Ireland. He was educated at highly respected Catholic schools in both Ireland and England and became known as a gifted orator. In his twenties he became involved with the “Young Ireland” movement, a group dedicated to independence from England, and soon became one of its most eloquent voices.

  In 1848 Meagher was convicted of treason after the “Young Irelander Rebellion”—a six-day uprising in southern Ireland that ended in a gun battle, during which 65 policemen were killed.

  Meagher and several other rebel leaders were sentenced to death by hanging, and drawing and quartering. The sentence was commuted and the men were sent to the British penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land instead, which later became Tasmania, Australia.

  In 1849 he was given a “ticket of leave,” meaning he was free to travel around the island…in exchange for a promise not to escape. In 1851 he saved a young woman from an overturned carriage. He later married her and they had a son.

  The following year, Meagher turned in his ticket of leave and notified authorities that he planned to escape and left the island in a rowboat. After four days at sea he was picked up by an American whaling ship headed to San Francisco.

  From San Francisco, he made his way to New York City, where he earned a law degree, started a newspaper, and worked the lecture circuit speaking about Irish independence. His wife came to see him in New York once, but then returned to Ireland and died a few years later. Meagher never met their son.

  In the late 1850s, Meagher spent a year in Central America studying the possibility of building a railroad across the Isthmus of Panama, and wrote about his adventures (which included hunting jaguars) for Harper’s Magazine.

  People generally read an item 25% more slowly on a computer screen than on paper.

  When the American Civil War began in 1861, Meagher joined the Union Army. By 1862 he was a brigadier general and the leader of the “Irish Brigade,” a hard-fighting outfit that saw action in several key battles, including Bull Run, Antietam, and Fredricksburg. He was injured twice, both times when his horse was shot
out from under him. He resigned in May 1865, just after the war’s end.

  That September, Meagher was appointed acting military governor of the Montana Territory.

  In 1867 he was aboard the steamboat G.A. Thompson on the Missouri River in Fort Benton, Montana, when he fell overboard. According to most reports he’d been drinking, although others say he was murdered by one of the many enemies he’d made during his time as governor.

  The Irish revolutionary hero, escaped prisoner, New York lawyer, newspaper publisher, jaguar hunter, brigadier-general, and governor of Montana—was never seen again. He was 43 years old.

  A statue of Meagher on horseback with a raised sword in his hand stands in front of the Montana state capitol building in Helena, and Meagher County in central Montana is named in his honor.

  FROM THE CLASSIFIEDS

  These all appeared in newspapers.

  • Attorney at law: 10% off free consultation

  • Braille dictionary for sale, must see to appreciate

  • For you alone! The Bridal Bed Set

  • Mixing bowl set. Designed to please a cook with round bottom for efficient beating

  • Snowblower for sale—used only on snowy days.

  • Semi-annual after Christmas sale

  • Boneless bananas, 39 cents a pound

  Arms race? The ant farm and Raid insecticide were both invented in 1956.

  MEET THE BEATS

  The Beats were America’s first hipsters. But what were they, like, really about, man?

  THE OTHER SIDE OF AMERICA One night in 1948, two students at New York’s Columbia University, John Clellon Holmes and Jack Kerouac, were hanging out talking about what they thought was wrong with the modern world—the constant threat of nuclear war, the hollowness of suburbia, and the stifling academic mainstream. At one point, Kerouac remarked, “This really is a beat generation.”

  What did Kerouac mean? It was something he’d heard a few years earlier from someone he’d met in Times Square, a street hustler named Herbert Hunche. According to Kerouac, Hunche told him that “beat” meant that “you’re exhausted, at the bottom of the world, looking up or out, sleepless, wide-eyed, perceptive, rejected by society, on your own, streetwise.”

  Holmes’ and Kerouac’s clique consisted of a handful of equally disenchanted artists, writers, and academics, all with (un)healthy interests in drugs, booze, and urban culture, including poet Allen Ginsberg and novelist William S. Burroughs. This was the Beat Generation, and they found their escape in the underexplored and often seedy side of American life. And they expressed it in what would come to be highly influential written works.

  SEX, DRUGS, BEBOP

  The Beats thought the way to enlightenment and artistic fulfillment was to go out and experience the world, especially the fringe elements. They hitchhiked around the country, befriending (and emulating) hobos and outlaws (like Hunche), and they experimented with marijuana, Benzedrine, and morphine.

  The main core of the Beats ultimately settled in San Francisco’s North Beach in the mid-1950s, where they congregated at jazz clubs for smokey jam sessions and in coffee houses for poetry readings. The structure of jazz—it was experimental, non-linear, freeform, often stream-of-consciousness—heavily influenced the way the Beats wrote.

  The first color animated TV commercial, for Ford in 1949, was created by Dr. Seuss.

  BOOKING IT

  But the fact that the Beats were literary doesn’t mean they were refined. Beat literature had a tendency to be raw, lurid, personal, and extremely confrontational—and that was the point. Here are some excerpts from three of the most influential pieces of Beat literature:

  • On the Road (1957). Jack Kerouac’s autobiographical novel about a road trip full of crime, shady characters, and the unseen underbelly of ’50s America is considered the definitive Beat work. Kerouac reportedly wrote it in just three weeks, typing stream of consciousness-style on a 120-foot scroll of paper. It was so unstructured that before it could be published, it had to be edited (sections deemed pornographic were deleted) and reformatted with conventional punctuation and paragraph breaks. Here’s a passage:

  And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels.

  • “Howl” (1956). Ginsberg’s furious epic free-verse poem was first performed at a poetry reading at San Francisco’s Gallery Six. Published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Press, “Howl” was banned as obscene; Ferlinghetti was arrested, and the trial that followed brought national attention to the work. Here are the first few lines of the poem:

  I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of coldwater flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz…

  • Naked Lunch (1959). William S. Burroughs’ controversial novel also led to an obscenity trial. Published in Paris in 1959, it wasn’t released in the U.S. until 1962. Semi-autobiographical, Naked Lunch follows the surreal adventures of junkie William Lee (Burroughs was a morphine addict). Here’s a sample:

  “Selling is more of a habit than using,” Lupita says. Nonusing pushers have a contact habit, and that’s one you can’t kick. Agents get it too. Take Bradley the Buyer. Best narcotics agent in the industry. Anyone would make him for junk. I mean he can walk up to a pusher and score direct. He is so anonymous, grey and spectral the pusher don’t remember him afterwards.

  The only English word that contains the letters “xyz” in order: hydroxyzine.

  THE BEAT LEGACY

  • The Beat Generation set forth the idea that it was okay to try new avenues in art, even if (or especially if) they were dark, unsettling, and personal. Artists sharing this philosophy included comedian Lenny Bruce, painter Jackson Pollock, photographer Diane Arbus, and filmmaker John Cassavetes.

  • Beat writers popularized spontaneous, stream-of-consciousness prose and performance art, along with abstract expressionism and postmodernism. Modern-day “slam”-style poetry is a direct outgrowth of the Beats. So was the “New Journalism” or “literary nonfiction” movement of the ’60s and ’70s. Writers would deliver long, narrative, true stories (in which they were active participants) about the edges of American life as if it were a novel, in a highly descriptive, free-flowing manner. Two of those writers: Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test), and Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas).

  • Blogging is a relatively new form of information delivery (often challenging mainstream media) by regular people who explore the world around them and document it in online journals, if not for an audience than for the sake of self-expression. Tech writer Tom Forenski of ZDnet.com argues that bloggers are the present-day equivalent of the Beats. “Both celebrate the written word, and both celebrate a raw and passionate literature that is largely unedited. And both are disruptive movements.”

  BUT SERIOUSLY

  Six months after the USSR launched Sputnik, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen gave the Beats their most famous nickname when he called them beatniks in a 1958 column. “I made fun of the Beats because they took themselves so seriously,” he remembered. “I had a drink with Allen Ginsberg one night at Vesuvio and we walked across the street to Tosca. He was barefoot. The uptight Italian who owned the place kicked him out. ‘But I’m Allen Ginsberg,’ he shouted. The guy had never heard of him.”

  Americans spend $50 billion a year on pet food—as much as they spend on dental care.

  11 FICTIONAL DOCTORS

  Is there is a doctor in the house? Yes, but he’s not rea
l.

  DR. EMMETT BROWN: Inventor of the flux capacitor, which he used to travel through time. In the Back to the Future movies he was portrayed by Christopher Lloyd, who got the role when John Lithgow became unavailable.

  DR. JOHN CARPENTER: Elvis Presley’s character in 1969’s Change of Habit, the last in the long string of Presley’s musical comedies. While serving at an inner-city health clinic, Dr. Carpenter falls in love with a co-worker (Mary Tyler Moore). Elvis doesn’t get the girl this time, because Moore’s character is a nun. (At least he gets to sing “Rubberneckin’.”)

  DR. DEMENTO: The alter ego of disc jockey Barret Hansen. From 1970 to 2010, he hosted a syndicated radio show focusing on novelty songs. Claim to fame: He discovered “Weird Al” Yankovic in the late ’70s when Yankovic, then an unknown college senior, started sending homemade tapes of his song parodies to the show.

  DR. MARK GREENE: The main character of ER (played by Anthony Edwards), from its first season in 1994 until 2002. He was a divorced dad trying to raise a daughter while working his residency as an emergency room doctor. The character died from a brain tumor in season 8, after Edwards, one of the highest-paid stars in TV history, decided to leave the show.

  DR. HENRY HIGGINS: In George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion, and in the Broadway musical adaptation My Fair Lady, the professor of phonetics bets his colleague Col. Pickering that he can turn a rough-around-the-edges Cockney flower girl into a refined, proper lady. Dr. Higgins does, but also falls in love with her. He winds up with her in the musical, but not in the play.

  DR. PAMELA ISLEY: In a 1966 Batman comic, Dr. Isley is a botanist from Seattle who helps a criminal steal an artifact full of ancient herbs. The criminal, fearing she’ll turn on him, poisons her with the herbs. They don’t kill her—they make her superpowered and immune to all natural toxins. She then transforms herself into a supervillain eco-terrorist and Batman’s rival, Poison Ivy (which is a corruption of “Pamela Isley”).