Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  E.T. phone Rome: The Vatican has called in experts to study the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

  A GRIM DISCOVERY

  The disappearance of the Örnen became one of the great mysteries of the Arctic. Only 1 of the 36 pigeons made it home, and that one was released only hours after takeoff with a scrawled note that everything was going well. After that there was no word, no sign, nothing—until 33 years later. In 1930 a Norwegian sealing ship hunting the coast of White Island, just off the northeastern tip of Svalbard, made a grim discovery: two skeletons, one propped against a rock, the other curled up on the ground. Both still wore fur parkas. A third skeleton was found in a shallow grave nearby. The man sitting up held a diary. It was Andrée, and the journal in his dead hands told all. The balloon had crashed on July 14, just three days into the flight and only 160 miles north of takeoff.

  WRONG-WAY ANDRÉE

  It took the men a week to make a sledge of their basket and load it with supplies. Then they started walking—the wrong direction. Two weeks and 60 miles of slogging later, they realized their mistake. Then the ice pack began to break up around them, and they converted the sledge to a boat. For weeks they drifted, finally sighting land—White Island—on September 17, and reaching the island two weeks later. They had enough food to last out the winter, but they were physically spent and suffering from food poisoning caused by eating raw polar bear meat. Strindberg was the first to go, apparently from a heart attack. On October 17, Frankel died in his sleep. Andrée made a final note in his diary and died soon after. Another 12 years passed before Robert Peary, Matthew Henson, and four Inuit guides became the first humans to reach the North Pole. They arrived on April 6, 1909…on foot.

  During Robert Peary’s trek to the North Pole (1909), he lost eight toes to frostbite.

  JOE STALIN VS.

  JOHN WAYNE, PART II

  Conspiracy theorists take heart: Here’s Part II of the story. (Part I is on page 276.)

  STRANGER THAN FICTION

  The tale that Michael Munn tells in his book John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth is more exciting than the plots of many of Duke Wayne’s own films. And it raises some interesting questions. Did Stalin really send KGB agents to kill Hollywood’s most outspoken enemy of communism? And if so, how did all of the Duke’s other biographers miss the story?

  One thing that makes Munn’s story difficult to verify is the fact that it’s based entirely on circumstantial evidence. Wayne died in 1979, a quarter-century before Munn’s book was published, so he can’t vouch for any of the things that Munn claims he said and did. All the other firsthand witnesses to the events described—Orson Welles, Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, stuntman Yakima Canutt, and others—have been gone for many years as well. Another problem: Wayne’s 48-page FBI file, made public as a result of the Freedom of Information Act, makes no mention of any communist conspiracies against him, let alone a KGB hit ordered by Stalin and thwarted by FBI agents.

  THE DICTATOR

  Munn’s story does seem to fit with what historians know about Joseph Stalin’s personality, his interests, and the bizarre way in which he ruled the Soviet Union after World War II. Stalin turned 70 in 1948, and although Soviet propaganda still presented him as a vigorous man with an iron constitution, his health was failing and he had just five more years to live. He never really recovered from the strain of waging war against Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945, and within weeks of the war’s end he suffered what was either a heart attack or a stroke. More attacks soon followed, and by 1948 visitors to the Kremlin began to notice what one described as “conspicuous signs of his senility.” By then, Nikita Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs, the Soviet government had “virtually ceased to function” at the highest level as the failing Stalin lost interest in the day-to-day business of governing. He almost never convened meetings of the Politburo, the Central Committee, or any other formal organs of government. Instead, Stalin hosted informal gatherings of his cronies several nights a week in the Kremlin movie theater.

  Foulmouthed: 40% of American men do not brush their teeth every day.

  SHOWTIME

  Movies, not affairs of state, were the first order of business at these gatherings. What little work that could be done had to be done between the film screenings, or at the drunken dinners Stalin hosted at his country house after the movies were over.

  Stalin liked Soviet films and had a large collection of European and American films, many of which were seized from the collection of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels at the end of WWII. Among his favorites: detective films, boxing films, and any Charlie Chaplin comedy (except The Great Dictator, which he despised). He also liked Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, and was a big fan of James Cagney gangster movies.

  But most of all, said Khrushchev, Stalin liked cowboy movies. “He used to curse them and give them a proper ideological evaluation and then immediately order new ones.” Stalin especially liked Westerns by director John Ford, who gave John Wayne his breakthrough role in 1939’s Stagecoach. Ford cast Wayne in more than 20 films, eight of which were released during Stalin’s lifetime, and though few records of the Kremlin screenings survive, it’s a pretty safe bet that he’d seen at least a few of the Duke’s films and knew who he was.

  NO WONDER THEY CALL HIM MARSHAL

  Stalin identified with the characters in Western films. He saw himself as the Soviet equivalent of a town sheriff or U.S. Marshal, biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore writes in Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. “Stalin regarded himself as history’s lone knight, riding out, with weary resignation, on another noble mission, the Bolshevik version of the mysterious cowboy arriving in a corrupt frontier town.”

  Stalin’s contemporaries reported that he had trouble distinguishing between reality and life as it was depicted in the movies. Soviet filmmaker Grigori Kozintsev learned this when he was invited to a Kremlin screening in the 1930s: “Stalin didn’t watch movies as works of art,” he wrote in Sight and Sound magazine, “he watched them as though they were real events taking place before his eyes, the real actions of people—beneficial or destructive—and he immediately gave vent to his irritation if the people on the screen didn’t work well, and praised them when they acted correctly.”

  TASER is an acronym for “Tom Swift’s Electric Rifle.” (The A was added later.)

  CECIL B. DE STALIN

  For years Stalin had been, in all but name, the head of the entire Soviet film industry as well as its chief censor. He personally assigned film projects to directors and actors, instructed screenwriters on the ideologically “correct” means of presenting historical events, made editorial changes to screenplays, and even composed lyrics for songs used in films. He had the final say on everything. If there was something he didn’t like about a film, it was done over. Period. No film was released to the public without Stalin’s personal approval.

  Even foreign films—which were almost never shown outside the Kremlin walls—had to meet Stalin’s approval: Once when Minister of Cinema Ivan Bolshakov showed a foreign film containing a brief nude scene, Stalin pounded the table and yelled, “Are you making a brothel here, Bolshakov?” then stomped out of the theater. Bolshakov was luckier than his two predecessors—when they displeased Stalin, they were taken away and executed. (Bolshakov never showed Stalin a nude scene again. From then on he previewed every film before showing it to Stalin and cut out any scene containing even a hint of nudity.)

  WHITE HATS VS. RED HATS

  It’s conceivable that Stalin could have ordered John Wayne killed. After all, Stalin was nuts—“not quite right in the head,” as Khrushchev put it. He certainly had no hesitation when it came to killing people: Stalin is believed to have murdered as many as 20 million of his fellow citizens during his 30 years in power, and he wasn’t shy about reaching beyond the borders of the Soviet Union to kill them, either. In 1940, for example, Stalin dispatched KGB assassins to kill his rival Leon Trotsky in Mexico.

  India has a larger popula
tion than the entire continent of Africa—but is only a tenth the size.

  John Wayne was one of the most popular film stars in Hollywood, but he was an outspoken opponent of communism—an anticommunist cowboy who publicly and vehemently opposed everything that Stalin stood for. He was someone Stalin could not control—a “black hat,” or villain, perhaps, in the crazy Western movie that was playing in Stalin’s failing, paranoid mind. And what does a sheriff do when a villain arrives in town? It’s conceivable that U.S.(S.R.) Marshal Joe Stalin could have decided, as the Western cliché goes, that “this town ain’t big enough for the both of us” and ordered John Wayne killed.

  STAR TREATMENT

  The pieces might seem to fit…until you learn more about Michael Munn, who turns out to be the weakest link in his own chain. Had Munn stopped with the Wayne biography in 2003, he might have retained the credibility he had when the book was first published. But he didn’t stop: In 2008 he wrote a biography of actor Richard Burton, and it, too, is filled with claims that are hard to believe and harder to prove. Munn writes, for example, that Burton had affairs with Lana Turner and Marilyn Monroe (he’d never been linked to them before) and was once caught in a brothel with actor Errol Flynn. (“Sensationalist nonsense,” a Burton family member told the South Wales Evening Post. “We’ve read his diaries and he never mentions Errol Flynn. I don’t think they met.”)

  Then in 2009, Munn published a biography of British actor David Niven. In it, Munn claims he was at the dying Niven’s bedside in 1982 when Niven confessed to attempting suicide after his first wife died in a freak accident. Munn says Niven also confessed to having affairs with Grace Kelly and Princess Margaret, the sister of Queen Elizabeth II. As if that were not enough, he says Niven also claimed that his second wife contracted a venereal disease after sleeping with John F. Kennedy.

  HERE COME THE SONS

  Niven’s sons had never heard any of these stories before, and they’d never heard of Munn, either, even though Munn billed himself as an intimate family friend. Even more puzzling: Niven’s sons couldn’t figure out how Niven would have even been able to tell Munn any of these stories. Niven died from Lou Gehrig’s disease, which by 1982 had robbed him of the ability to speak—and that would have made such “confessions” very difficult. (Munn says he taped his conversations with Niven. So why doesn’t he just produce the tapes and put the controversy to rest once and for all? Because, he says, the tapes got “chewed up” by his tape recorder and he threw them all away.)

  Who wrote the lead article for Readers’ Digest issue #1 in 1922? Alexander Graham Bell.

  So why would Munn wait until 2009 to publish things that Niven supposedly told him 25 years earlier? Niven’s son, David Jr., has a theory that could apply to all three of Munn’s biographies: “Everyone featured in these stories is rather conveniently dead, so we can’t ask them to verify them,” he says.

  PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN SONGS

  • William Henry Harrison (1840): “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” Harrison was a hero in the Battle of Tippecanoe during the War of 1812; his running mate was John Tyler.

  • Abraham Lincoln (1864): “Battle Cry of Freedom,” a Union rallying song written during the Civil War by George F. Root. More than 700,000 copies of the song’s sheet music were sold, making it one of the bestsellers of the 19th century.

  • Franklin D. Roosevelt (1932): “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Originally written for the movie Chasing Rainbows, the song came to be known as the unofficial Democratic Party theme song.

  • John F. Kennedy (1960): “High Hopes,” written by Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn a year earlier for the film A Hole in the Head. (It won an Oscar.) Cahn wrote new lyrics for JFK’s campaign.

  • Lyndon Johnson (1964): “Hello, Lyndon,” a parody of “Hello, Dolly.”

  • Jimmy Carter (1976): “Ode to the Georgia Farmer,” by K.E. and Julia Marsh, written to sound like a Civil War ballad.

  • George W. Bush (2000): “We the People,” performed by Billy Ray Cyrus.

  • John McCain (2008): “Raisin’ McCain,” performed by John Rich of the country music duo Big & Rich.

  Humphrey Bogart and Princess Diana were distant relatives.

  VIOLET PRECIPITATION

  In the puzzle below, we’ve substituted synonyms into the titles of popular books, movies, TV shows, landmarks, etc. See if you can identify the items we’re talking about. (Answers on page 538.)

  1. Joined Commonwealths of the Western Hemisphere (country)

  2. Birthed to Travel (album title)

  3. Jesus-believing Bundle (actor)

  4. A Wind-Up Citrus Fruit (novel and movie)

  5. Bestride, Increasing the Frequency With Which You Hurry (American landmark)

  6. Woman and the Vagrant (animated movie)

  7. Violet Precipitation (album title and movie)

  8. Check Turnstile (software company founder)

  9. Angry Males (TV drama)

  10. The Enormous Barricade of the Orient (landmark)

  11. Circuit of Gaul (sporting event)

  12. English Crude Oil (company)

  13. The Big Cat, the Sorceress, and the Bureau (book and movie)

  14. The Shadowed Section of Earth’s Satellite (album title)

  15. “Praise the lord, it’s the last day of the work week!” (common phrase)

  16. Insignificant Quest (board game)

  17. Officer Engines (corporation)

  18. Determination and Elegance (TV sitcom)

  19. The Nobleman of the Jewelry (book and film series)

  20. Global Drinking Container (sporting event)

  21. Banishment on Central Ave. (album title)

  22. The Book of Maps Gesticulated (novel)

  23. Dad’s Brother Toilet (important person)

  In 2007 AT&T censored a live Pearl Jam webcast when the band criticized George W. Bush.

  UNCLE JOHN’S ANTS

  One day Mrs. Uncle John said, “How come there isn’t ever anything about aunts in Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader? and Uncle John answered, “Hey! An article about ants! That’s a great idea!”

  THE ANT-CESTOR

  One day around 150 million years ago, a small wasp went through an evolutionary change—and poof! it became the very first ant on Earth. Okay, it wasn’t quite like that, but evolutionary biologists claim that all evidence shows ants evolved from a primitive species of wasp between 130 and 160 million years ago. It happened just once, they say, in just one location, and all ants alive today are descended from those very first ants.

  Wasps are indeed the creatures genetically most closely related to ants today. Ants, along with bees—which also evolved from wasps—are the only members of a suborder of insects known as Apocrita.

  HIGH HOPES

  Fossil records reveal that ants weren’t very numerous for the first several million years of their existence. It wasn’t until the explosion of the angiosperms—the flowering trees and plants—around 100 million years ago, and the subsequent creation of friendly new habitats (like leafy forest floors), that ants began to diversify into hundreds, then thousands, of species. Today there are more than 14,000 known species spread around the planet so thoroughly that there are only a few places without native ant populations—Antarctica, Greenland, Iceland, and some remote islands in the Pacific Ocean.

  Ants range from just of an inch to more than an inch in length. They can live in an enormous variety of habitats—underground, inside fallen trees, and even in treetops where they never touch the ground. They’re able to communicate a huge amount of information to each other through a combination of touch and chemoreception—the use of pheromones to send and detect messages. And they live in highly organized, very complex societies. They are without question among the most successful animals in the history of life on Earth and, according to myrmecologists (scientists who study ants), they number in the quadrillions. That’s millions of millions of ants. So many that, combined, they not only outnumber, they actually outwe
igh all six billion humans on Earth.

  “Choose to be optimistic. It feels better.” —the Dalai Lama

  ANT-I-MATTER

  With so many different kinds of ants out there, just what is it that distinguishes them from insects? First, the basics: Ants are insects and, like all insects, they have three body parts (head, thorax, and abdomen), three sets of jointed legs, a pair of antennae on their heads, and a hard exoskeleton (as opposed to the internal skeleton that humans have) that supports and protects their bodies. They are also holometabolous insects, meaning they go through four distinct life stages: egg, larva, pupa, and adult.

  A trait ants share with only their closest relatives, wasps and bees, is the petiole, that narrow “waist” between the thorax and abdomen, which allows them to bend their bodies and navigate through their twisty nest tunnels. Also, like wasps and bees, females of many ant species can release a potent cocktail of poisons through a stinger on the end of their abdomen. Why only females? Because the stinger is actually an evolved version of an ovipositor, an organ used to lay eggs, found in many insect species.