Uncle John's Fully Loaded 25th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (Uncle John's Bathroom Reader)

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  Speed dating was invented by Yaacov Deyo, a Los Angeles rabbi, in 1998.

  MAN MEETS CARTOON

  Since the dawn of cinema, filmmakers have tried to combine cartoon characters with the real-life world. Here’s the history of animation in live action films.

  GERTIE THE DINOSAUR

  In the early-1910s, American cartoonist Winsor McCay wanted to break into the nascent motion picture business. At the time, he was best known for Little Nemo in Slumberland, a comic strip that followed the adventures of a young boy in a magical dreamworld. After two unsuccessful attempts at animation, McCay created a 12-minute silent film called Gertie the Dinosaur that debuted on February 8, 1914, at Chicago’s Palace Theater.

  Audiences were astounded. Gertie was as much “performance art” as it was a film. The initial screenings featured McCay dressed in a tuxedo and carrying a whip, standing in front of a movie screen, pretending to interact with a cartoon brontosaurus named Gertie. Much like a lion tamer at a circus, the cartoonist instructed the dinosaur to perform various tricks such as “catching” treats and dancing on her hind legs. And for the big finale, the real McCay ducked out of sight, allowing a previously filmed, on-screen version of himself to be picked up and carried away by Gertie.

  McCay’s animation was rudimentary by today’s standards. Without techniques like cel animation, which allows parts of each frame—characters and backgrounds—to be reused, the production was incredibly labor-intensive. The artist himself painted thousands of frames on rice paper. But McCay invented time-saving tricks, such as registration marks and cycling (the reuse of animation in later scenes), that are still being used today. Following the success of the first shows, a revamped version of Gertie with a live-action prologue toured the country, and McCay returned to his day job.

  THE ALICE COMEDIES

  Gertie heavily inspired a young animator named Walt Disney. After his Kansas City–based Laugh-O-Gram studio went bust in 1923, Walt and his brother Roy pooled their resources to open a new operation in Hollywood. Once there, they shopped around Alice’s Wonderland, a 10-minute short loosely based on the character created by Lewis Carroll. In the film, which was as reality-blurring as Gertie, Alice encounters a group of cartoon animals while touring an animation studio. Although it was never released theatrically, it impressed investors—so much so that the Disneys were able to raise the funds to produce their next film project (unrelated to Carroll’s characters), the Alice Comedies.

  In the Hawaiian language, the apostrophe symbol in words like Hawai’i is called the ’okina.

  Starring child actress Virginia Davis as Alice, a typical installment followed her adventures with a cartoon cat named Julius as they roamed various animated backdrops that included a Wild West town and the ocean floor. In order to create the illusion that she was interacting with an animated environment, Roy filmed Virginia’s performances in front of a white backdrop (often in a single take because they didn’t have enough film for reshoots). Then Walt took the footage and combined it with sparse cartoon backgrounds and characters drawn on white paper.

  Compared to Disney’s later films, the Alice Comedies are stark and unpolished, and some have racist elements. In Alice Cans the Cannibals, for example, Alice thwarts a village of African cannibals in grass skirts (who look like they stepped out of a minstrel show), and in Alice and the Dog Catcher, Alice is the leader of the Klix Klax Klub, a group of kids who wear paper bags over their heads, à la the Ku Klux Klan. But the films were acceptable—and successful—in their day. Disney released 57 Alice Comedies before turning his attention to a cheaper animated series starring Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, precursor to a certain animated rodent.

  THE ROTOSCOPE

  During this same period, animator Max Fleischer, best known for bringing Popeye and Betty Boop to the big screen, also experimented with live action–animation combinations. In 1915 he invented rotoscoping, a technique in which animators painstakingly trace over filmed images, frame by frame, thereby combining the two forms. He filmed his brother Dave in a clown suit and then rotoscoped the image, transforming it into Koko the Clown for his “Out of the Inkwell” series, which ran from 1918 to 1926. In 1923 he produced two 20-minute educational films that used the rotoscope technique—Theory of Relativity and Theory of Evolution—explaining the works of Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin. (In one scene involving an X-ray machine, an actor’s hand morphs into an illustration of the bones underneath his skin.) As the sound era emerged, Fleischer used rotoscoping to incorporate performances of jazz musicians Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong into cartoons. He used it in animated Superman shorts and feature films, and Disney used it in Snow White.

  Warner Music earns $5,000 a day in royalties for the song “Happy Birthday to You.”

  TOON TOWN

  In the years that followed, studios continued to experiment with the live-animated format. Notable moments:

  • 1940. Warner Bros.’ You Ought to Be in Pictures, a short starring Porky Pig and Daffy Duck. At the beginning of the nine-minute film, Daffy convinces Porky to jump off a drawing board into the real world in order to look for a better-paying job at another studio. Unlike the Alice Comedies, the short featured animated characters running around a live environment, rather than vice versa. Few advanced special effects were used to combine Porky and Daffy with the live footage—for many scenes, animators simply enlarged still photographs and added animation cels over them.

  • 1945. In the feature-length comedy Anchors Away, Gene Kelly performed a four-minute tap-dance routine with Jerry Mouse, of Tom and Jerry. (Producers wanted him to dance with Mickey Mouse, but Roy Disney reportedly said no.)

  • 1964. In a scene in Disney’s Mary Poppins, Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke jump into an animated chalk drawing, ride animated merry-go-round horses into an animated countryside, and dance with animated penguins.

  THE COMPUTER AGE

  In 1976 Futureworld, a sequel to the hit Westworld, became the first major theatrical release to utilize computer animation to create a special hand-and-face effect, for actor Edward Catmull. After that, computer-generated imagery (CGI) became the standard for creating special film effects that combine live action with animation, from the computerized worlds of Tron (1982) and the realistic dinosaurs of Jurassic Park (1993), to the alien world of Pandora in Avatar (2009).

  Contrary to popular belief, a mother bird will not reject its baby if a human touches it.

  ONE-LINERS

  Classic schtick from 20th-century comics.

  “My wife has a slight impediment in her speech. Every now and then she stops to breathe.”

  —Jimmy Durante

  “I just bought a new house. It has no plumbing. It’s un-can-ny.”

  —Morey Amsterdam

  “I’m 83, and I feel like a 20-year-old, but unfortunately there’s never one around.”

  —Milton Berle

  “I was so ugly my mother used to feed me with a slingshot.”

  —Rodney Dangerfield

  “A man says, ‘Doc, I gotta strawberry growing out of my head!’ The doc says, ‘Here’s some cream to put on it.’”

  —Tommy Cooper

  “My hotel room is so small, when I put the key in, I broke the window.”

  —Henny Youngman

  “Want to wake up with a smile on your face? Go to sleep with a clothes hanger in your mouth.”

  —Totie Fields

  “My wife said to me, ‘If you won the lottery, would you still love me?’ I said, ‘Of course I would. I’d miss you, but I’d still love you.’”

  —Frank Carson

  “My cooking is so bad my kids thought Thanksgiving was to commemorate Pearl Harbor.”

  —Phyllis Diller

  “An undertaker calls a man, ‘About your mother-in-law, should we embalm her, cremate her, or bury her?’ He says, ‘Do all three. Don’t take chances.’”

  —Myron Cohen

  “Drinking removes warts and pimples. Not from me—from
the people I look at.”

  —Jackie Gleason

  “I used the be quite the athlete—big chest, hard stomach. But that’s all behind me now.”

  —Bob Hope

  “Lawyers practice law because it gives them a grand and glorious feeling. You give them a grand and they feel glorious.”

  —Milton Berle

  When her husband was president, Julia Tyler used the title “Mrs. Presidentress.”

  BATHROOM NEWS: AIRPLANE EDITION

  Here are a few fascinating bits of bathroom news that we’ve flushed out from airplane bathrooms around the world.

  ON A ROLL

  In September 2011, an All Nippon Airways flight from the island of Okinawa to Tokyo was cruising uneventfully at 41,000 feet when the captain got up to take a bathroom break. The break was uneventful, but when the captain returned to the cockpit and the copilot tried to let him in, instead of pushing the button that unlocks the cockpit door, he accidentally hit the rudder trim knob. That sent the jet into a steep dive and caused it to roll almost completely upside down. In the 30 seconds that it took the copilot to wrestle the plane back under control, it fell 6,234 feet. Two flight attendants were injured and six passengers became airsick as a result of the incident. The good news: Because the plane was flying over water at night, it was so dark outside that many passengers, securely belted in their seats, had no idea the plane was nearly upside down. “We are deeply sorry for causing anxiety to our passengers,” an ANA spokesperson said afterward.

  KNOCK, KNOCK! WHO’S THERE?

  Two months later, in November 2011, the captain of a Delta flight from North Carolina to New York took a bathroom break after an air traffic controller advised him that the plane was likely to be put in a holding pattern when it arrived at LaGuardia Airport, 30 minutes away. Unlike his counterpart on the All Nippon Airways flight, this captain never made it out of the restroom: When he tried to unlock the door, the latch broke, trapping him inside.

  FAA regulations require that at least two people be in the cockpit at all times. So when the captain left for his break, the lone flight attendant on the small commuter jet joined the co-pilot in the (locked) cockpit. That meant that the only people left in the passenger section to hear the captain pounding on the bathroom door for assistance were the passengers. When a passenger in the first row offered to assist, the captain gave him the secret password to let him into the cockpit, so that he could tell the copilot and flight attendant what had happened. Only problem: The passenger had what the copilot later described as a “Middle-Eastern” accent. When the well-meaning man knocked on the door to the cockpit, the copilot feared that the captain might have been overpowered by hijackers. “The captain has disappeared in the back. What I’m being told is he’s stuck in the john. Someone with a thick foreign accent is giving me a password to access the cockpit, and I’m not about to let him in,” the rattled copilot radioed to air traffic controllers.

  Real newspaper headline: “Jets Patriots jumphead goes herey barllskdjf fkdasd fg asdf”

  Fighter planes were alerted and the copilot was preparing to make an emergency landing when the captain finally forced his way out of the bathroom, returned to the cockpit, and assured the co-pilot and air traffic control that everything was fine. “No one was ever in danger and everyone, including the good Samaritan who tried to help the captain, and the crew, are to be commended for their actions,” the airline said in a statement.

  LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

  In February 2012, Artie Hughes and his wife were enjoying a barbecue at their New York home—which happens to be in the flight path of JFK Airport—when a jumbo jet passed overhead and spattered them with an oily black liquid. Fearing the material was engine oil, hydraulic fluid, or some other critical substance, they quickly called the airport police so that the aircraft could be identified and warned that it might have mechanical problems. The responding police officer had other ideas. “Looks like something nastier than that,” he said. He was right: The substance turned out to be chemically treated sewage from a leaky holding tank. At last report, the couple were asking for an investigation…and nothing more. “I think they should find out what happened,” said Hughes. “Was a button pushed? Was the lavatory filled to capacity before it left the ground?”

  WINDOW SEAT

  When the long-awaited Boeing 787 Dreamliner entered service in October 2011, the planes were brimming with state-of-the-art features, like TVs on every seat back, an LED lighting system that reduces jet lag, higher cabin humidity for greater passenger comfort, and the largest cabin windows of any commercial aircraft in history, complete with auto-dimming “smart glass” that can be darkened with the push of a button instead of pulling down a shade. But the most interesting new feature (at least as far as Uncle John is concerned): Even the bathrooms have windows, so you can enjoy the view while answering nature’s call at 43,000 feet. “We’re making flying fun again,” said Boeing spokesperson Mary Hanson.

  In Japan, pets outnumber kids.

  Not everyone was impressed with the bathroom windows when they were first introduced to the public. One woman who toured an early Dreamliner mock-up in Seattle complained that the prodigious portholes were an invasion of privacy. Duly noted, and ignored. “I told the lady that if someone was close enough to look in the window, she had a much bigger problem than being seen on the toilet,” said Boeing senior engineer Ken Price.

  * * *

  A GOOD DAY TO DIE

  On the morning of December 17, 2003, the website of the National Weather Service posted an especially stressful advisory for Missouri residents:

  URGENT-WEATHER MESSAGE: UNUSUALLY HOT WEATHER HAS ENTERED THE REGION FOR DECEMBER … AS THE EARTH HAS LEFT ITS ORBIT AND IS HURTLING TOWARD THE SUN… EXCESSIVE HEAT WATCH IN EFFECT FROM THIS AFTERNOON TO LATE TONIGHT.

  UNUSUALLY HOT WEATHER WILL OCCUR FOR AT LEAST THE NEXT SEVERAL DAYS AS THE EARTH DRAWS EVER NEARER TO THE SUN. THEREFORE…AN EXCESSIVE HEAT WATCH HAS BEEN POSTED.

  The alert turned out to be a test message accidentally posted during a training session; it was removed later in the day and replaced by a correction…and an apology.

  Can you? Some people can hear their eyeballs moving.

  WEIRD BEQUESTS

  You can’t take it with you…so you might as well have a little fun when you leave it behind.

  SKULLDUGGERY

  In 1955 an Argentine man named Juan Potomachi bequeathed 200,000 pesos (about $43,000) to the Teatro Dramatico theater in Buenos Aires. The catch: His skull got to “play” Yorick, the skull Hamlet holds up for his soliloquy in Act V. A year later, Potomachi’s skull “co-starred” in a production of Hamlet.

  STAKEOUT

  Harold West of London, England, died in 1972, terrified of vampires to the end. In his will, he instructed his doctor “to drive a steel stake through my heart to make sure that I am properly dead.” (No word on whether his wish was carried out.)

  SWAN SONG

  McNair Ilgenfritz of Sedalia, Missouri, died in 1953. Part of a family that owned a large hardware business, Ilgenfritz died unfulfilled: He’d wanted to be a composer, but never had any luck getting his works produced. So in his will, he left the majority of his $150,000 estate to New York’s Metropolitan Opera…on one condition: that the world-famous opera company stage one of his works, either La Passant or Phedre. The Met initially accepted the offer, but after a few years, changed their mind and returned the money to Ilgenfritz’s family.

  HEAD OF THE CLASS

  In 1826 Jeremy Bentham, one of the most important philosophers in England’s history, helped found the University of London. He so loved the school that he bequeathed his body to them, to be dissected by an anatomy class. He also requested that afterward, his skeleton be put on display in a glass cabinet at the college, clothed and topped with a wax replica of his head. Upon his death in 1836, Bentham was indeed dissected and preserved. His remains now reside in a glass case at the university.

  Apple’s
initial public offering in 1980 was the largest since the Ford Motor Company’s in 1956. It sold out in minutes, making 40 Apple employees instant millionaires.

  BY THE BOOK

  Mark Gruenwald was an editor for Marvel Comics for decades, spending most of his career working on Captain America. He died in 1996, and in his will, asked that he be cremated so that his ashes could be mixed into comic book ink. Marvel obliged, and a little bit of Gruenwald was placed in every issue of the 4,000-copy paperback bind-up of one of his final projects, Squadron Supreme.

  HUM DRUM

  A man known only as S. Sanborn was a hatmaker who died in Massachusetts in 1871. He left his body to science, specifically asking that famous scientist and Harvard anatomy professor Oliver Wendell Holmes be given access to it. Then, Sanborn instructed, Holmes was to turn Sanborn’s skin into two drums, which he was to give to a friend. The friend was to go to Boston at dawn every June 17, the anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill in the Revolutionary War, and play “Yankee Doodle.” Sanborn requested that the rest of his body be “composted for a fertilizer to contribute to the growth of an American elm.” His wishes were carried out.

  LAST LAUGH

  In 1994, a Portuguese aristocrat named Luis Carlos de Nornha Cabral da Camara went to a registry office in Lisbon with two witnesses to lay out the terms of his will (wills are not customary in Portugal). In front of the witnesses and a government official, da Camara picked 70 names randomly out of the Lisbon phone book and made them the beneficiaries of his estate. In 2007, da Camara died, and 70 Portuguese people got very surprising phone calls, informing them they’d inherited items from a man they’d never met—like a 12-room apartment, a country house, a car, and 25,000 euros. “He was a good man,” said one of da Camara’s neighbors, “although he drank a lot.” “I’m sure he just wanted to create confusion,” said another. “That amused him.”