Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  THE SUPERMODEL VS. THE PILOT

  While the plane was still on the tarmac at London’s Heathrow Airport in 2008, British Airways captain Miles Sutherland took the unusual step of personally informing a passenger that one of her three bags had gone missing. That passenger was tantrumprone supermodel Naomi Campbell. She cut Sutherland off mid-sentence and called someone on her mobile phone, saying, “They have lost my f***ing bag! Get me another flight! Get the press! Get my lawyer!” Sutherland tried to inform her of her options, but was again cut off: “How dare you tell me what my options are,” she said. “You are not leaving until you find my f***ing bag!” (It contained her favorite pair of jeans.) Sutherland walked away while Campbell shouted, “You are a racist! You wouldn’t be doing this if I was white!” When police came to get her, she spat at and kicked them. According to a witness, “Campbell was wearing formidable platform boots with stiletto-style heels.” She was convicted of assaulting an officer and disorderly conduct, fined £2,300 ($3,500) and ordered to perform 200 hours of community service.

  The Fatburger fast-food chain sells “Hypocrites”—veggie burgers topped with bacon.

  THE RAPPER VS. THE POLITICIAN

  Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and Grammy-nominated rapper Sky Blu (real name: Skyler Gordy, nephew of Motown founder Berry Gordy) were on the same Air Canada flight, returning to Los Angeles after attending the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia. While they were still at the airport, Sky Blu reclined his seat back. Romney was sitting behind him. The plane had pulled away from the gate and was rolling toward the runway, which meant the seats were supposed to be in the upright position. According to Sky Blu, Romney sternly ordered him to put up his seat-back. Sky Blu ignored him. Romney asked again, and then grabbed his shoulder in a “Vulcan grip.” Sky Blu stood up, turned around, and raised his fists. “I didn’t take it any further than that,” he later told reporters. “The man assaulted me. I was protecting myself.” But according to a spokesperson for Romney, the rapper actually took a swing at the politician. Whether he did or not, Romney’s wife screamed, the flight crew intervened, and the plane returned to the gate, where police took Sky Blu into custody. Romney didn’t press charges; Sky Blu was released and caught a later flight home. He later said that if Romney had simply asked him nicely, he would have put his seat-back up.

  PARENTAL ADVISORY: DICK VAN DYKE

  In October 2008, a technical glitch in Apple’s iTunes Music Store led to unintentional censorship of song titles without regard to context. For example, Dick Van Dyke’s novelty song “The Dick Van Dyke Song” was listed as “The D**k Van D**e Song,” and Danny Kaye’s “I Thought I Saw a Pussy Cat” became “I Thought I Saw a P***y Cat.” The errors occurred when Apple ran an internal check for explicit song titles…and the software automatically censored the titles.

  Sacramento Kings forward Lionel Simmons missed two games in 1991. Reason: tendinitis from playing too much Game Boy.

  BAD NEWS / GOOD NEWS

  More proof that not every cloud has a silver lining…but some do.

  CALL ME

  Bad News: One night in March 2010, Dan Oien, 62, began suffering seizures in his Indianapolis, Indiana, home. Oien, who had been fighting brain cancer for some time, tried to call for help. Unfortunately, he didn’t have enough control of his muscles to dial the right number, and he accidentally called a local college student named Aquarius Arnolds. Arnolds didn’t recognize the number on her caller ID—and she doesn’t answer such calls.

  Good News: Normally she doesn’t answer such calls, but this time, for some reason, she did. “I couldn’t understand anything the caller was saying,” Arnolds said. “It seemed like he was in distress, so I just said, ‘Do you need help?’ and he belted out ‘Yes.’” Arnolds quickly called 911 and gave them the caller’s phone number. Minutes later paramedics busted down Oien’s door and rushed him to a hospital. “He dialed one phone number, and it just happened to be the right person,” said Sherry Proctor, Oien’s girlfriend. “I thank God for that.” She added that Arnolds’s actions allowed the terminally ill man’s out-of-town siblings to visit him before he passed away. (And Arnolds herself became a regular visitor to Oien’s bedside in the months before he died.)

  EASY STREET

  Bad News: In the early 2000s, Tommy Larkin of Newfoundland, Canada, began looking for his younger brother; they had been adopted into different families when they were kids in the early 1980s. Unfortunately, despite years of trying, he’d had no luck and was close to resigning himself to the fact that he was never going to find his brother.

  Good News: In 2010 Larkin, now 30 years old, got a call from the adoption agency that had been helping him. They’d found his brother. The woman at the agency, Larkin said later, gave him his brother’s name—Stephen Goosney—“and asked four or five times if I knew him. I said I didn’t, and she kept asking me if I was sure I haven’t met him.” Why was she being so insistent? Because Goosney lived across the street from him. It turned out that the long-lost brothers had lived on the same street for more than two years and had lived across the street from each other for the previous seven months. Not only that, Stephen Goosney had been looking for his lost brother all that time, too. “It was a good feeling,” Goosney told reporters, “knowing there was actually someone looking for me,” adding that he and his newfound brother were now “just hanging out and trying to catch up.”

  SHOP AROUND

  Bad News: For several years, social worker Dan Coyne did all his grocery shopping at the same Jewel-Osco store in Evanston, Illinois. And his favorite checkout clerk was Myra de la Vega. “Whenever I saw her working there I’d intentionally go to her line,” Coyne, 52, told CNN, “because she’s one of those rare employees that treats everybody with respect and kindness.” One day de la Vega, 57, didn’t look so good. Coyne asked her what was wrong, and she told him that she’d been diagnosed with renal failure, which required her to undergo nearly eight hours of dialysis every night. She needed a kidney transplant but couldn’t find a donor. Not even her own sister was the right blood match.

  Good News: Coyne went home and talked to his wife about it and, a few days later, offered de la Vega one of his kidneys. She was understandably shocked—she only knew Coyne from the store. But Coyne was serious. He got tested and—against 4,000-to-1 odds—was a perfect match. Finally, two years after Coyne made his offer, on March 26, 2010, he and de la Vega walked together into Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s Kovlar Organ Transplantation Center in Chicago. Several hours later, Coyne’s favorite checkout clerk had one of his kidneys. “It was an easy decision,” Coyne said. “All I have to do is fall asleep on a table, and then the doctors take over.” De la Vega was, of course, a bit more impressed. “I think he is an angel living on Earth,” she said. “You can say I’m corny but that’s how I regard him.” Both patients made full recoveries—and de la Vega is no longer on dialysis.

  7% of American men say they’ve sold their ex’s stuff on eBay.

  HOW TO HYPNOTIZE

  A CHICKEN

  When Uncle John learned that it was possible to do this, his first thought was, “Why would anyone want to hypnotize a chicken?” Good question. As Sir Edmund Hillary would say, “because it’s there.” (And it’s a lot easier than climbing Mt. Everest.)

  YOUR CHICKEN IS GETTING SLEEPY…

  It wasn’t very long ago that most Americans lived on farms, and lots of people knew how to hypnotize chickens. Not anymore—how many people can say they know anything about chickens, let alone how to hypnotize one? But if you ever get a chance to place a chicken under your spell, give it a try—it’s fascinating to watch, harmless and painless for the chicken, and it provides an interesting insight into animal intelligence and behavior. (Who knows—you might even win a bar bet.)

  STEP BY STEP

  1. Techniques vary widely from place to place. Some methods call for laying the chicken gently on its side, with one wing under its body, holding it in place
with one hand so that your other hand is free. Others say that turning the chicken upside down, lying on its back with its feet up in the air, is best. Either way, the disoriented bird will need a second to regain its bearings, but once it does it will not be bothered by being in this unfamiliar position.

  2. Some hypnotists advocate placing a finger on the ground at the tip of the chicken’s beak and drawing a line four inches long in the dirt extending out from the beak and parallel to it (picture Pinocchio’s nose growing). Trace your finger back and forth along the line for several seconds. Other practitioners say that drawing a circle, not lines, in the dirt around the chicken’s head works best. Still others say all you need to do is stroke the chicken on its head and neck with your index finger. If one method doesn’t seem to work, try another.

  3. Whichever method you try, keep at it for several seconds. That’s about how long it takes for a chicken to go into a trance. Its breathing and heart rate will slow considerably, and its body temperature may even drop a few degrees.

  35% of airplane accidents occur during takeoff; 60% occur during landings.

  4. You can now let go of the chicken. It will lie perfectly still in a trancelike state for several seconds, several minutes, or even an hour or more before it comes out of the trance on its own. You can also awaken the chicken yourself by clapping your hands or nudging it gently. (The unofficial world record for a chicken trance: 3 hours, 47 minutes.)

  5. If holding a chicken in one hand while hypnotizing it with the other proves too difficult, another technique calls for putting the chicken in the same position it goes into when it’s asleep—with its head under one wing—and rocking it gently to induce a trance.

  CHICKEN SCIENCE

  Just as there are different theories as to which method of chicken hypnotism is best, so too are opinions divided as to what exactly is going on with the chicken when it is being hypnotized:

  • The trance could be a panic “freeze” response, similar to a deer stopping in the middle of the road when it sees headlights.

  • It may also be an example of tonic immobility, a reflex similar to an opossum’s ability to go into a trancelike state when it feels threatened. Chickens roost in the branches of trees or other high places at night; the trance reflex, if that is indeed what it is, may help the chicken to remain perfectly still, silent, and (hopefully) unnoticed as foxes, raccoons, and other predators prowl below.

  SPORTS MEDICINE

  “In a development that could one day score a touchdown for better health, chemists in Australia have created a ‘Super Bowl’ molecule that shows promise for precision drug delivery. Shaped like a miniature football stadium, the molecule is capable of delivering a wide range of drugs—from painkillers to chemotherapy cocktails—to specific areas of the body, potentially resulting in improved treatment outcomes and perhaps saving lives.”

  —Journal of the American Chemical Society, January 2005

  A normal breath takes five seconds: two to inhale, three to exhale.

  ESPERANTO, PARTO TRI

  So why isn’t this chapter written in Esperanto instead of English? Because while Esperanto has its fans, it never really caught on as an international language. Why not? Here’s Part III of our story. (Part II is on page 296.)

  HERE, THERE, CIULOKE

  By 1905 Esperanto had become a worldwide movement, with speakers on every continent except Antarctica. Speakers had 27 different Esperanto-language magazines to choose from and thousands of books to read, many of them original works of Esperanto literature. More of the world’s great works of literature were translated into Esperanto every year.

  1905 was also the year that the Esperanto movement held its first World Congress, in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France. With the exception of the World War I and World War II years, a congress has been held every year since. The single most important piece of business ever conducted by the Esperantists was transacted at that very first conference in Boulogne: They voted to establish Zamenhof’s early works, known collectively as Fundamento de Esperanto, as the permanent and immutable basis of the Esperanto language. This “Declaration of Boulogne” remains in force to this day.

  WIN SOME, LOSE SOME

  The Declaration of Boulogne spared Esperanto from the fate that had befallen Volapük and other constructed languages: With the basis of Esperanto set in stone, the movement would never splinter into a hundred different factions, each believing its own version of Esperanto was best.

  But the Declaration of Boulogne also set the Esperanto movement on a collision course with the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Language, which was still trying to pick a single international auxiliary language. The advantages of adopting Esperanto were obvious—it was the most successful constructed language in history, it already had an established base of tens of thousands of speakers all over the world, and it was growing rapidly.

  A pitched baseball slows by about 8 mph by the time it reaches home plate.

  But Esperanto was the language of linguistic amateurs, as far as the French intellectuals at the Delegation were concerned. It was still burdened with Zamenhof’s silly diacritical alphabet, and it still had no word for “mother” other than “father-feminine-noun.” To the Delegation, Esperanto wasn’t so much a language as it was a scandal, one popular with—gasp!—ordinary people. The Delegation refused to endorse it.

  ESPERANTO JR.

  Not as is, anyway. Esperanto wasn’t going to change—the Declaration of Boulogne made that clear. But the language did have much about it that was desirable, so in the end, the Delegation decided to build a new language out of Esperanto by fixing or getting rid of everything they hated about it. They called their new language Ido—Esperanto for “Offspring”—and in 1907, they proclaimed it the world’s new international auxiliary language. They probably assumed that the great unwashed Esperanto masses would see the error of their ways and come over to Ido, which was close enough to Esperanto to make it easy for them to switch.

  They were wrong. Ido flopped: Though many university professors and other high-profile leaders in the Esperanto movement defected to Ido, the overwhelming majority of rank-and-file Esperantists stayed put. They had no interest in a language without a culture, even if the eggheads thought Ido was better.

  And just as Zamenhof had feared would happen to Esperanto, once Ido opened its own door to tinkering, it was doomed. One reformer after another split off from Ido to create their own “improved” version of the language, each of them sapping Ido’s strength without any of them catching on. Only an estimated 2,000–5,000 people speak Ido today, and if it weren’t so similar to Esperanto, the number of speakers would likely be smaller still.

  WAR AND PEACE

  Esperanto’s best chance for becoming a truly universal language came in the early 1920s, following the end of World War I. An estimated nine million solders died in the war—far more than had died in all the wars fought in the previous 100 years—and six million civilians were killed as well. (Zamenhof himself died of natural causes in April 1917, at the age of 57.)

  First white man scalped by Indians: Simón Rodriguez, in what is now Florida, in 1540.

  The astonishing scale of the carnage helped to reignite interest in establishing an international language as a tool for peace. Attempts were made to win official support for Esperanto at the League of Nations, which, had they succeeded, might have led to Esperanto being made a part of elementary and high-school curricula worldwide. But France and other countries saw Esperanto as a threat to their own national languages, and they withheld all but token support for it.

  THE ENEMY WITHIN…AND WITHOUT

  The League of Nations was set up to prevent a repeat of World War I. It failed, of course. After World War II ended in 1945, yet another attempt was made to promote Esperanto as an international language with the United Nations, the successor to the League of Nations. The leaders of the postwar Esperanto movement made repeated attempts to tone down the eccentrics among the
Esperantist community, at least when they were out among the general public. These efforts were not particularly successful, but it didn’t really matter. The real challenge that Esperanto faced in the postwar era wasn’t its own eccentricities: It was English.

  ESPERINGLISH

  By the end of World War II, English was well on its way to becoming the new international language. It, not Esperanto, had become a mandatory part of the educational curriculum in schools all over the world. Numerous attempts were made to boil English down to a more simplified or “controlled” form that non-native speakers could adopt as a first step to learning the full language.

  In 1959, for example, the U.S. Government’s Voice of America foreign broadcasting service inaugurated broadcasts in what it called “Special English” that used a limited vocabulary of about 1,500 words, simplified grammar, and a slow, careful delivery to make broadcasts targeted at non-native speakers easier to understand. Making English simpler—more like Esperanto, in other words—has proven a lot more effective than trying to teach the whole world to speak Esperanto.