Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  Not a single internee was ever charged with espionage, and no one understood better than Yoshikawa that they were innocent. He knew because he had tried to recruit Japanese Americans, sounding them out about their loyalties without revealing his purpose, and had failed. “They had done nothing. It was a cruel joke,” he admitted to the Daily Mail. “You see, I couldn’t trust them in Hawaii to help me. They were loyal to the United States.”

  First Miss Black America contest: 1968. Miss Black Tennessee 1971: Oprah Winfrey.

  THE MONTY HALL PARADOX

  Remember Monty Hall, the host of the TV game show Let’s Make a Deal? Monty (and the show) may be gone, but his name lives on in a fascinating probability puzzle that was inspired by one of the “deals” on his show.

  DOOR PRIZE

  Imagine you’re a contestant on Let’s Make a Deal, standing in front of three giant doors labeled “1,” “2,” and “3.” Behind one of the doors (you don’t know which one, but Monty does) is a new car. Behind the other two doors are booby prizes: live goats. Monty Hall invites you to choose a door; you’ll win whichever prize is behind it. You pick a door—say, Door #1. But before Monty tells you what you’ve won, he opens one of the doors you didn’t pick, say Door #3, to reveal…a goat. Then he asks you, “Do you want to switch to Door #2?” Well, do you? Will switching from Door #1 to Door #2 improve your chances of winning the car? This puzzle, originally called the “Monty Hall Problem,” was first proposed by a statistician named Steve Selvin in 1975.

  THINK AGAIN

  If you think the odds are the same whether you stick with Door #1 or switch to Door #2, you’re not alone. That’s what most people would say, because that seems to make sense. After all, if there’s one car and three doors, the odds of it being behind Door #1, Door #2, or Door #3 are are exactly the same: 1-in-3. But that’s the wrong way to look at the problem. According to Selvin, you have to think of it in terms of the one door you picked versus the two doors you didn’t pick: The odds that the car is behind the door you picked are 1-in-3, and the odds that the car is behind one of the two you didn’t pick are 2-in-3. The odds don’t change when one of the doors is opened because the prizes haven’t moved. Sure, once Door #3 is opened to reveal a goat, the odds of the car being behind that door drop to zero. But there’s still a 2-in-3 chance that the car is behind one of the two doors you didn’t pick. That means there’s now a 2-in-3 chance that the car is behind Door #2. Switching from Door #1 to Door #2 actually doubles your odds of winning the car—from 1-in-3, to 2-in-3. So switch doors!

  Ataullah Durrini, the creator of Minute Rice, was a cousin of the king of Afghanistan.

  THE MISSING-CHILDREN

  MILK CARTON PROGRAM

  If you were around in the 1980s, you undoubtedly remember them: black-and-white photos of missing children printed on the sides of cardboard milk cartons. Here’s the story of how it all started.

  ABDUCTED

  On Sunday morning, September 5, 1982, 12-year-old Johnny Gosch set out from his West Des Moines, Iowa, home before dawn on his Des Moines Register newspaper route. His father often went with him on Sundays, but this time the boy did his route alone, taking only the family Dachshund with him. By 6:00 a.m. the Gosch home was getting phone calls from neighbors: Where were their newspapers? John Gosch, Johnny’s father, got out of bed and went to look for his son. Two blocks from their home he found Johnny’s wagon, full of papers, and the Dachshund standing nearby. Johnny Gosch was nowhere to be found.

  Almost exactly two years later, on Sunday, August 12, 1984, an eerily similar tragedy struck the city: 12-year-old Eugene Wade Martin left his home before dawn to deliver the Register. His older brother normally went with him, but not that day. At 7:30 a.m. the route manager called the family to say that Eugene’s newspapers were found at a corner on his route. Eugene Martin had been abducted, and he hasn’t been seen since.

  HELPING HANDS

  The story of a second boy being kidnapped shook the small Iowa city, and people there did what they could to find them: The Register ran full-page ads with the boys’ pictures and information, and a local trucking company put poster-size images of the boys’ faces on the sides of their trucks. Then, in September 1984, a month after the second abduction, an employee of Anderson-Erickson Dairy asked company president Jim Erickson if there was some way they could help, too. Erickson said yes and, influenced by what both the newspapers and the trucking company had done, he decided to run photos and short bios of the missing boys on the sides of the dairy’s half-gallon milk cartons. That, he figured, would get the boys’ faces onto kitchen tables in thousands of homes in the area every morning. A week later, Prairie Farms Dairy, also in Des Moines, decided to do the same. Tragically, Johnny and Eugene were never found, but Jim Erickson’s idea gave the issue of missing and abducted children a big publicity boost in Des Moines—and it wasn’t long before it became a national phenomenon.

  The braille edition of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows weighs 12 lbs.

  TO THE WINDY CITY

  In November 1984, Walter Woodbury, vice president of Hawthorne Mellody Dairy in Whitewater, Wisconsin, one of the biggest milk distributors in Chicago, saw one of Anderson-Erickson’s cartons while on a trip to Iowa. “I thought we could do it in Chicago,” he told a newspaper at the time. “I talked to Commander Mayo [of the Chicago Police Department’s youth division], and he was very enthusiastic. The police thought it was a heck of an idea.” Using the same format as Anderson-Erickson, the dairy’s half-gallon cartons would carry photos and short descriptions of two of the city’s missing children. The photos would be chosen by the police department and approved by parents, and would be changed monthly. Best of all, they would appear on roughly two million cartons every month. Shortly after Chicago’s first missing-children milk cartons appeared in January 1985, the program got the national attention it needed. Good Morning America, The Today Show, and CBS Morning News all covered the story, as did the Associated Press.

  GO WEST, YOUNG PROGRAM

  Near the end of 1984, Steven Glazer, chief of staff for California state assemblyman (and future governor) Gray Davis, read a newspaper article about the Chicago milk carton program. He thought it was a great idea, and he talked Davis into promoting it as a statewide program. Glazer contacted dairies around the state, and dozens signed up. The program kicked off in early 1985, and photos of missing kids began appearing on tens of millions of milk cartons every month.

  California’s program produced results. Glazer says that in just the first few months at least 12 children, most of them runaways, returned home as a result of the campaign. One of the first was a Los Angeles teenager who’d run away to live with friends in Sacramento; she saw a local news report about the program—and saw her own photo on one of the cartons. She decided to go home the next day. And a Los Angeles Times news story on May 23, 1985, reported that of the 14 missing kids from the Los Angeles area who appeared on milk cartons, seven were returned home.

  Number of DVDs rented daily in the U.S.: 6 million. Number of public-library items checked out: 3 million.

  Having a state as large as California take on the program earned it national and even international press, and it was about to get even bigger.

  FROM SEA TO SHINING SEA

  In late January 1985, the National Child Safety Council (NCSC), a non-profit organization that had been working with police and schools around the country to promote child safety issues since the 1950s, announced that they were launching their own Missing Children Milk Carton Program nationally. The NCSC already had 100 dairies signed up and would soon begin printing information about missing children, along with a national toll-free telephone number, on cartons distributed all across the country. By March more than 700 dairies were involved—and an incredible 1.5 billion milk cartons with images of missing kids on them were being distributed nationwide. In April the NCSC announced that reported sightings of missing children had increased by more than 30 percent.

&nbs
p; The success of the program led to many other items being used to display missing kids’ faces over the next few years, including shopping bags, soda bottles, billboards—even bills from power and gas companies.

  MOVING ON

  But as big as the Missing Children Milk Carton Campaign was (and as big a piece of American culture as it remains), it was actually pretty short-lived. A combination of factors, including the fact that many parents complained that seeing the pictures of missing kids everyday was scaring their own children, led to the end of the program after just a few years. “The milk-cartons program ran its course,” said Gaylord Walker, NCSC vice president. “They had a tremendous impact and they did a great job of creating public awareness.” But how successful was the program in helping with the return of abducted kids? Nobody knows for sure—because nobody kept any hard, verifiable numbers on the program as a whole. What we do know is that many runaways and at least some abducted children were returned to their families as a result of the milk cartons—and that, most would argue, made it all worthwhile.

  And the idea behind it didn’t go away: The NCSC, along with organizations such as the government-funded National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), continued using a variety of programs to teach parents and kids how to avoid trouble in the first place, what to do if the worst happens, and especially how to get information about missing kids to police agencies and the public as quickly as possible. One of the best-known programs is an electronic version of the milk carton program: the NCMEC’s “Amber Alert” system, implemented nationally in 2002 and named for 9-year-old Amber Hagerman, who was abducted and killed in Arlington, Texas, in 1996. It allows for extremely rapid public outreach on abduction cases via TV and radio stations, email, electronic traffic-and-road condition signs, electronic billboards, and more. So although pictures of missing kids no longer appear on milk cartons, the spirit of the program lives on.

  EXTRAS

  • Missing-children programs are still being implemented worldwide. As recently as 2008, the British organization Missing People launched a campaign with a supermarket chain to put the faces of missing people on milk cartons.

  • On March 2, 2009, a three-year-old girl was abducted from her bed in Yreka, California, in the middle of the night. Her father managed to get a look at a car speeding off. Yreka residents, each with Amber Alert posters with photos of the girl and descriptions of the car, started their own search the next morning. An hour later, three volunteers spotted tire tracks in the mud near a railroad track. They followed them, saw the car—and found the little girl. She was unharmed, and was quickly back home with her parents. The car’s owner, Kody Lee Kaplon, 22, was arrested and is facing felony charges.

  3 asteroids named after musicians: 2620 Santana, 3834 Zappafrank, and 4147 Lennon.

  HOW TO CRACK A SAFE, PT. III

  So you can’t find the combination to your safe, and you don’t have the time, patience, or skill (or the electronic listening device) to try the method on page 303. Fear not: You can still drill, burn, or blow the safe open.

  DRILL, BABY, DRILL

  If a safecracker can’t figure out the combination to the safe he’s trying to open, the next step is often to drill into the safe. The safecracker’s assessment of how the safe is constructed will help determine whether to drill through the door, the rear, or one of the sides.

  • Drilling through the door is the most direct method. The safecracker may try to drill directly into the locking mechanism in order to defeat or destroy it. Or they may drill a peephole over the wheel pack that allows them to see the notches in the wheels. Once the wheel pack is visible, all the safecracker has to do is turn the dial until the notches line up, and the safe is unlocked. A special fiber-optic instrument called a boroscope can be inserted into the peephole to make the wheel pack easier to see.

  • The problem with drilling through the door is that safe manufacturers expect you to drill through the door, and many pack the door with extra security features to discourage an attempt. The area around the dial and locking mechanism, for example, may be protected by special layers of hardened steel or other materials that are very difficult to drill through. The door could be filled with ball bearings (also difficult to drill through) or even a pane of glass that incorporates one or more spring-loaded relocking devices. Drilling into the glass will cause it to shatter, tripping the devices and making the safe much more difficult to open.

  ON THE SIDE

  • One simple way to get at the contents of the safe is to drill not one hole in the side or the rear of the safe, but several, in a close square or circular pattern. The safecracker can then use a sledge hammer to punch out the square or circle, resulting in a hole big enough to reach through to remove the contents of the safe.

  • Another technique is to drill two holes—a peephole and a second hole—in the rear of the safe, directly opposite the locking mechanism in the door. Because many models of safes are designed to make changing the combination easy (when the safe door is open), the locking mechanism may only be covered by a panel that’s fastened to the inside of the door with ordinary screws. Breaking into the wheel pack may be as simple as inserting a long screwdriver through the hole drilled in the back of the safe and unscrewing the panel.

  Nearly 20,000 haikus have been written about SPAM (the meat, not the e-mail).

  KABOOM!

  • Of course, it’s also possible to drill a hole large enough to insert a stick of dynamite or TNT, then light the fuse and blow the door off the safe, just like in the movies. Or you could pour nitroglycerine into the gap between the door and the rest of the safe and ignite it with a blasting cap and an electric charge.

  • A safecracker can also burn into the safe using an acetylene blowtorch, which burns at 4,000–4,500°F, or something called a thermic lance, which burns at 7,000°F, hot enough to melt through six inches of hardened steel in just 15 seconds.

  • The problem with these techniques, of course, is that they can easily destroy the contents of the safe. Paper burns at 451°F, and the steel in the safe is an excellent conductor of heat. If you try to burn your way into a safe filled with cash, all you may have to show for your trouble is ash that used to be cash.

  LUCKY BREAK

  • The good news—for you, if you’re the legitimate owner of a safe that you cannot open—is that there isn’t much of a market for safes that can never be opened again once the combination is lost or the relocking mechanisms have been triggered. Because of this, safe manufacturers incorporate flaws into the designs of their safes that enable locksmiths to drill them open again. All the locksmith has to do is obtain a special drilling template from the manufacturer that shows where and how to drill the safe open.

  • These templates are some of the most closely guarded secrets of the safe manufacturing industry; they’re made available only to approved professional locksmiths. So if you’re a burglar trying to open a safe, it’ll be just about impossible to get your hands on one.

  The term “witch doctor” was in use in England before it was associated with Africa.

  POSTMORTEMS

  No, it’s not a breakfast cereal made from dead people. It’s a collection of bizarre stories about things that happened to people postmortem, or “after death.”

  MISSED-EM

  In October 2006, a landlord in Vienna, Austria, checked the apartment of a tenant who hadn’t responded to several letters regarding a rent increase. He found the tenant, 93-year-old Franz Riedl, in the apartment, dead. And he’d been like that for at least four years. The landlord said he had no idea there was anything amiss with Riedl, explaining that Riedl had always been a recluse, so he’d seldom been seen, and that his rent had always been paid on time. (It was paid automatically from the same bank account that received his pension payment.) And nobody had ever reported an odor coming from the apartment. Police said they were able to determine the approximate date of death only because they found Austrian schillings in the apartment
. The schilling was taken out of circulation and replaced by the euro in January 2002. Officers added that Riedl’s body appeared to be “mummified.”

  TEXTED-EM

  In October 2009, police in Miramar, Florida, were investigating the case of a missing 35-year-old woman. In the first days after she disappeared, the woman sent her family text messages saying she’d moved, but the family didn’t believe it, telling police they had never received text messages from her before. They also said that she had been trying to leave her abusive boyfriend, Paul Edwards, 44, for some time. After the woman had been missing for almost a month, police decided to see how Edwards would react to a message…from his missing girlfriend. They received court permission to transfer her old cell phone number to a new phone, and then sent Edwards a text message: “Just wait ’til I get better.” It worked. Edwards left his house and drove to several different locations—and eventually led police to the woman’s body. Thanks to her “ghostly” text message, Edwards is now in jail, facing a charge of first-degree murder.

  In Japan, builders use bubble wrap as insulation and soundproofing in houses.

  RECYCLED-EM

  Gene Wilford Hathorn was convicted of capital murder in Huntsville, Texas, in 1985, and has been on death row ever since. In 2008 he was contacted by Danish-based artist Marco Evaristti, who asked Hathorn if he could have Hathorn’s body after the execution, when and if it ever happens. If that wasn’t weird enough, he told Hathorn what he wanted to do with it. “My aim is to first deep freeze Gene’s body,” Evaristti said, “and then make fish food out of it.” Hathorn agreed. Evaristti plans to stage an “art” exhibit—where visitors will have the opportunity to feed fish with the food made from Hathorn’s body. “It’s the last thing he can do for society and he views it as positive,” says Evaristti. Texas officials permit prisoners to choose whoever they want to care for their remains, and Hathorn has made the artist the legal heir to his body, so this may actually happen some day. (We’ll be sure to let you know if it does.)