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

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  TERRIFICA (Brooklyn, New York)

  Secret Identity: Sarah, 23, an employee of a computer consulting company, full name unknown

  Costume: Red tights, red knee-high leather boots, a red headband and red cape, topped off with a gold bra, gold eye mask, platinum-blonde wig, and a red utility belt containing a cell phone, camera, log book, pepper spray, condoms, Terrifica “fortune cards,” and Smarties (for energy).

  Details: Beginning in 1995 and continuing for a decade (she is now retired), Terrifica staked out Brooklyn-area bars and nightclubs to rescue tipsy women in danger of going home with men they’d just met. When she found one, she’d give the woman advice, a condom, and one of her fortune cards printed with tips on how to decline sexual advances and get out of relationships. “I protect the single girl living in the big city,” she told ABC News in 2004. “I do this because women are weak. They are easily manipulated, and they need to be protected from themselves and most certainly from men and their ill intentions toward them. People are happiest when they’re alone and living their solitary lives.”

  How can you tell when a rabbit is happy? It clicks its teeth.

  Terrifica’s archenemy (besides intoxicated, amorous couples and bartenders who thought she was bad for business) was “Fantastico,” a ladies’ man who frequented the same watering holes and had Terrifica pull more than one woman from his clutches. “She seems to have it in for men,” Fantastico told ABC News. “I’m convinced she is loveless and would love to have the rest of the city as loveless and miserable as she is.”

  And a real-life supervillain…

  THE GOLDEN DON (Big Sky, Montana)

  Secret Identity: Unknown

  Costume: A dark hooded cloak and a golden mask that covers his face

  Details: What’s a superhero without supervillains? In the comicbook world, superheroes like Batman often arise in response to evil that has gotten out of control. In the real world, real-life supervillains like the Golden Don arise in order to poke fun at make-believe superheroes. The Golden Don, a member of a group known as The Roaming Eye of Doom, says he was “born of hatred for silly people who dress up and go out and ‘fight crime.’ We want to disrupt, trip-up, and generally distract the silly and implausible villain community at large. And make low-quality but funny videos.” Another villain group to watch for: the Ruthless Organization Against Citizen Heroes (ROACH).

  * * *

  OOPS!

  In July 2012 Canadian Dale Whitmell, 40, was camping near Anjigami Lake in Ontario, when he tried to kill a mouse—and shot himself in the forehead instead. Whitnell had attempted to kill the mouse by crushing it with the butt of his rifle, which caused the rifle to go off. He was treated at a nearby hospital, after which police charged him with careless use of a firearm.

  Before soccer referees used whistles, they waved handkerchiefs to indicate fouls.

  NAME THAT PRESIDENT

  U.S. presidents can award the Presidential Medal of Freedom—America’s highest civilian honor—to anyone they choose. Take this quiz to find out if their choices are predictably partisan or not. (You may be surprised.)

  THE PRESIDENTS

  Which of these U.S. presidents hung the Presidential Medal of Freedom around the neck of which honoree?

  • Richard Nixon

  • Jimmy Carter

  • Gerald Ford

  • George H. W. Bush

  • Bill Clinton

  • George W. Bush

  • Barack Obama

  THE RECIPIENTS

  1. BOB DYLAN

  The President said: “No one ever picks up a guitar thinking, ‘You know what, if I keep this up, I could get a medal in the White House.’”

  2. MARGARET THATCHER

  The President said: “Never, ever will it be said that Margaret Thatcher went wobbly.”

  3. GEORGE H.W. BUSH

  The President said: “When democratic revolution swept across Eastern Europe, President Bush made possible an achievement once thought impossible, ending the Cold War without firing a shot.”

  4. BOB DOLE

  The President said: “In this city often known for taking itself too seriously, we are all better for his fine sense of humor.” Dole’s reply? “I had a dream that I would be receiving something from the president. But I thought it would be the front door key.”

  5. GEN. TOMMY FRANKS

  The President said: “At a recent high school reunion, Tommy’s old principal told the general, ‘You weren’t the brightest bulb in the socket,’ to which the general replied, ‘Ain’t this a great country?’”

  According to experts, if you wave your arms, your dog can identify you from a mile away.

  6. DAVE THOMAS (Founder of Wendy’s)

  The President said: “Americans are not always in the mood for exquisite meals—sometimes all they want is a hamburger at the drive-up window.”

  7. GERALD FORD

  The President said: “I invited all the presidents to spend the night in the White House. I thought that would be a neat thing. President and Mrs. Ford said that they were going to spend the night in the hotel room where they had spent their first night as a married couple nearly 50 years before. I love that.”

  8. DUKE ELLINGTON

  The President said: “Would you all stand and sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to him? And, please, in the key of G.”

  9. JULIETTE GORDON LOW (Founder of the Girl Scouts)

  The President said: “She flew airplanes. She went swimming. She experimented with electricity for fun.”

  10. LUCILLE BALL

  The President said: “She was like everyone’s next-door neighbor, only funnier.”

  11. HYMAN RICKOVER

  The President said: “This is one of the few times when Admiral Rickover has walked toward me that I didn’t tremble in my shoes.”

  12. JOHN WAYNE

  The President said: “Through his countless film roles, ‘The Duke’ still leads millions on heroic adventures on behalf of fairness and justice.”

  13. RICHARD PETTY

  The President said: “I’m going to keep this short today because afterwards Richard Petty and I are going to take a few laps around the Ellipse in number 43.”

  14. GEN. COLIN POWELL

  The President said: “Powell has won the Presidential Medal of Freedom twice—once with distinction. I’m not sure what happened the other time.”

  Answers are on Page 602.

  A 1775 earthquake in Portugal caused waves on Loch Ness, Scotland—1,240 miles away.

  THE STRANGE FATE OF EBEN BYERS

  Some people become famous for the way they lived their lives…and some become famous for the way they, well, shuffled off this mortal coil. Eben Byers is one such unfortunate soul. (His coil glowed.)

  FALL GUY

  In November 1927, a wealthy industrialist named Eben Byers was returning from the annual Harvard-Yale football game aboard a special chartered train. Yale won the game 14–0, and Byers was a Yale alumnus. It’s not clear whether the celebratory atmosphere aboard the train (or Byers’s reputation as a ladies’ man) had anything to do with it, but sometime during the trip he fell out of his upper sleeping berth and injured his arm. The injury interfered with Byers’s golf game and his love life. He visited one doctor after another, but no one could ease his pain. Then a physician in Pittsburgh suggested he try Radithor, a patent medicine (which consisted of little more than the element radium in a distilled water solution).

  Radithor was a product of the Bailey Radium Laboratory of East Orange, New Jersey, founded by one “Dr.” William Bailey, a Harvard dropout who falsely claimed to have a medical degree from the University of Vienna. In 1915 he had served time in jail for mail fraud. A few years later, after a stint peddling strychnine, the active ingredient in rat poison, as an aphrodisiac under the brand name Las-I-Go For Superb Manhood, he began selling Radithor as “Pure Sunshine in a Bottle.” He claimed it would cure more than 150 different ailments.

  HOT STUFFr />
  Drinking radioactive water to improve health may sound crazy today, but in the 1920s, when much less was known about radiation, it seemed to make sense. People had long wondered what gave natural hot springs their supposed healing properties. When the waters were found to be mildly radioactive due to the presence of dissolved radon gas in the water (an hour’s soak in a hot spring exposed the soaker to as much radiation as an hour in the sunshine), the radon appeared to be the explanation.

  The first Harley-Davidson motorcycle used a tomato can for a carburetor.

  It wasn’t just quacks like Bailey who thought radiation was good for you. In an article in the American Journal of Clinical Medicine, a Dr. C. G. Davis claimed that “radioactivity prevents insanity, rouses noble emotions, retards old age, and creates a splendid youthful joyous life.” Other experts credited radiation with stimulating the body to throw off waste products.

  DRINK TO YOUR HEALTH

  Water from natural hot springs was bottled and sold as a health tonic, but devotees claimed that the bottled stuff lost most of its healing properties after just a few days. This, too, appeared to be explained by the radon, which has a radioactive half-life of just 3.8 days. That means that half of the radon will decay into other substances in that time. At that rate, less than 1 percent of the radon would remain in the water after just one month.

  If the radioactivity in spring water was what made it so beneficial, the thinking went, then water that had gone “flat” could be recharged by reirradiating it. There were numerous products on the market in the 1920s that enabled you to do just that: You could buy a Zimmer Radium Emanator that, when dunked in a bucket of water, irradiated it. Or you could store your water in a Revigator water crock, made from radioactive ore.

  ALL BETTER NOW

  Why stop with water? Companies sold radioactive hair tonic, face cream, toothpaste (for a glowing smile), blankets, soap, candy, chocolate bars, earplugs, hearing aids, laxatives, contraceptives, and countless other products that were credited with curing everything from pimples to high blood pressure to arthritis, gout, constipation, and chronic diarrhea.

  In addition to Radithor radium water, William Bailey also sold radioactive flu and cough medicines, and an athletic supporter called a “radioendocrinator” that he claimed would cure impotence. Wearers were instructed to position the radium “under the scrotum as it should be. Wear at night. Radiate as directed….” Eben Byers took his doctor’s advice and began drinking Radithor. A lot of it. He found the water so “invigorating” that he continued drinking it long after his arm stopped hurting. Byers’s cure was more likely due to the simple passage of time than to any purported healing effects of radium, but he didn’t know that. In addition to downing as many as three bottles of Radithor a day for nearly three years, he sent cases of the stuff to associates and lady friends and urged them to drink it. He even instructed his stable boys to feed Radithor to his racehorses.

  In 1989 the space shuttle carried 32 fertilized chicken eggs (a student experiment) into orbit.

  TOO MUCH OF A “GOOD” THING

  Byers kept right on drinking Radithor into the early 1930s, when he began losing weight and suffering aches and pains all over his body. These symptoms were soon followed by blinding headaches and terrible pain in his jaw, but it wasn’t until his bones began breaking and his teeth started falling out that he realized he was suffering from something much more serious than “inflamed sinuses,” as his doctors had diagnosed.

  Precisely what was wrong with him didn’t become clear until X-rays of his deteriorating jaw were sent to a radiologist in New York. The radiologist was familiar with the case of the “Radium Girls”—factory workers who had died after ingesting the radium in glow-in-the-dark paint while painting watch dials during World War I. The lesions on Byers’s jawbone were similar to the ones the Radium Girls had suffered. When the radiologist learned that Byers had consumed as many as 1,500 bottles of Radithor since 1927, his diagnosis, like Byers’s fate, was sealed.

  RADIOACTIVE MAN

  Had Radithor been made with radon gas dissolved in water, like the waters in natural hot springs, Byers probably would have escaped serious injury. But Radithor wasn’t made with radon, it was made with radium, a different radioactive element altogether. Radium’s half-life isn’t 3.8 days like radon’s—it’s 1,600 years. Even worse, because radium is chemically similar to calcium, instead of passing through the body in a day or two, which would have limited the amount of harm it caused, it accumulates in the bones, where the radiation it gives off destroys the surrounding bone marrow, blood cells, and other tissue. This was why Byers’s bones were breaking and his teeth were falling out—they’d been destroyed by radiation and were now disintegrating. By the time he began to experience the first signs of radium poisoning, he had already consumed more than three times the lethal dose. He was doomed.

  About a third of all the carpeting made in the U.S. contains recycled plastic water bottles.

  A GOVERNMENT INVESTIGATION

  Even if the Food and Drug Administration had understood just how deadly radium was, in those days its powers to act were very limited. Radium was neither a food nor a drug, after all—it was a naturally occurring element, placing it outside the agency’s jurisdiction. The only government agency capable of acting was the Federal Trade Commission, which was empowered to protect consumers against misleading trade practices, including false advertising claims. Ironically, the FTC had used this power to take action against companies selling products that claimed to contain radioactive materials but didn’t.

  By the time Byers fell ill, evidence of the dangers of radioactive products had begun to mount. The FTC opened an investigation into Radithor, which had been advertised as being “harmless in every respect.” Clearly it wasn’t, and in 1931 a legal team was dispatched to Byers’s estate to record his testimony. By then he was too sick to appear in court. “A more gruesome experience in a more gorgeous setting would be hard to imagine,” attorney Robert H. Winn remembered:

  We went to Southampton where Byers had a magnificent home. There we discovered him in a condition which beggars description. Young in years and mentally alert, he could hardly speak. His head was swathed in bandages. He had undergone two successful jaw operations and his whole upper jaw, excepting two front teeth, and most of his lower jaw had been removed. All the remaining bone tissue of his body was slowly disintegrating, and holes were actually forming in his skull.

  THE FALLOUT

  Thanks in large part to Byers’s testimony, Radithor was pulled from the market in December 1931. Byers died three months later, at age 51. Any doubts that the radium killed him were resolved at the autopsy, when some of his teeth and a portion of his jawbone were set on a plate of unexposed photographic film: The radiation in the bones exposed the film just as if it had been used in an X-ray machine. To prevent the radiation in Byers’s body from leaking out, he was buried in a coffin lined with lead.

  No one knows how many people died from drinking Radithor. At least one female friend of Byers died from radium poisoning after he introduced her to the product. In all, dozens or possibly even hundreds of people may have been killed. Considering that William Bailey is estimated to have sold more than 400,000 bottles of Radithor over the years, it’s a wonder that more didn’t die. Many were probably saved by the price: Even when it was sold by the case, Radithor cost $1.25 a bottle (around $15 in today’s money). Few people would have been able to afford to consume as much as Byers had.

  The E. coli bacteria in your stomach help your body manufacture vitamin K.

  LIGHTS OUT

  Byers’s death received a lot more press than those of the Radium Girls. (“The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off’ read a Wall Street Journal headline.) Reason: Byers was a millionaire socialite; the Radium Girls were working-class nobodies employed by a paint factory. Very few people worked in such a place, so their story wasn’t as scary to readers as Byers’s, who’d died because he drank
a health tonic sold to the public.

  The scandal surrounding Byers’s death prompted the government to grant the FDA much broader powers to regulate patent medicines and protect the public from other dangerous products. Another result: Today the sale of “radiopharmaceuticals”—radioactive materials used in medicine—is restricted to authorized members of the medical profession.

  CAVEAT EMPTOR

  If you collect antiques, you may know that some shops and dealers specialize in medical objects. From time to time an empty bottle of Radithor pops up, but think twice before you buy one—even though the bottles have likely been empty since their original purchasers consumed the product more than 70 years ago, the bottles themselves remain dangerously radioactive. Just like Eben Byers, still at rest in his lead-lined coffin in a cemetery in Pennsylvania, they will be radioactive for thousands of years to come.

  * * *

  Don’t test the river’s depth with both feet. —African proverb

  First national TV broadcast in color: the January 1, 1954, Tournament of Roses Parade.

  NEW AND IMPROVED CALENDARS

  The calendar most people use today, the Gregorian (introduced in 1582 and named for Pope Gregory XIII)—is a significant improvement over the Julian calendar it replaced. (The Julian was off by 11 minutes per year, which caused it to gain three days every 400 years.) But it’s not perfect. Here are some proposed “improvements” to the Gregorian calendar.

  DAYS OF OUR LIVES

  Can you remember, without looking at a calendar, how many days there are in September? How about March? In a perfect world, you wouldn’t have to remember whether November has 30 days or 31—the months would all be the same length. But that’s not possible with the calendar we use today: There are 365 days in the year, and 365 isn’t evenly divisible by 12, which it would have to be to get the same number of days in each month. Divide 365 by 12 and you get 30 with a remainder of 5. Those five extra days have to go somewhere.