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

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

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  RANDOM ORIGIN: TARMAC

  In the early 1800s, Scottish engineer John L. McAdam developed a roadmaking process that used pieces of broken-up rock about ¾″ in diameter for a road’s surface. With use the gravel became compacted, and the surface smooth and durable. “Macadamization,” as it became known, was a vast improvement over other roadbuilding techniques at the time, and “macadam roads” could soon be found worldwide. Decades later, when the automobile came along, dust became a problem. In 1901 English engineer Edgar Hooley stumbled on a solution to that problem, He happened upon a macadam road on which tar had spilled. Someone had covered the spill with crushed slag—a byproduct of metal smelting—which absorbed the tar, took away its stickiness, and stopped dust accumulation. Within a year Hooley had patented a tar and slag mix which could be easily sprayed on macadam roads. He founded Tarmac Limited. By 1920 the term “tarmac” was being used to refer to airport runways, and eventually included roads and similar surfaces. McAdam’s macadamization process, along with Hooley’s addition of tar and slag, is still the most widely used roadmaking process in the world.

  World’s largest casino: China’s Venetian Macao. It has 4,000 slot machines and gaming tables.

  SERIAL KILLERS:

  UNSOLVED CASES

  We like to cover a wide variety of subjects in every edition of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader. We have never shied away from gross topics, nor have we demurred from gruesome ones. Even so, we feel compelled to warn you that this one, while fascinating, might make you a little queasy. So if you’re squeamish, you might want to skip this article. (Uh-oh. Now you’re hooked.)

  BACKGROUND

  The most generally accepted definition of “serial killer” is someone who has killed at least three people over a period of at least a month, with a “cooling off” period in between the murders. (This is to differentiate from cases of “mass murder,” where someone might kill many people in a single event.) Many serial killers are never caught, which means that some are still at large today. Here are the stories of unsolved serial murders from around the world.

  THE FAMILY (Australia)

  Between 1979 and 1983, five young men between the ages of 14 and 25 were kidnapped, drugged, tortured, and murdered in and around the South Australian city of Adelaide. In 1984 Bevan Spencer von Einem, an Adelaide accountant, was convicted of committing one of the murders and is currently serving a life sentence. Although police believe von Einem took part in all of the murders, they lacked sufficient evidence to prove it. And anonymous witnesses—anonymous because they’d been threatened—informed police that while von Einem was guilty, he wasn’t alone: He was only one member of a shadowy group of prominent Adelaide citizens, including lawyers and doctors, who preyed on young men. Other members of this group, called “the Family” in the press, are believed to have taken part in all five murders—and possibly others—with von Einem. A $1 million reward still stands for information leading to further convictions.

  America’s tallest sand dunes are located in Colorado. They’re 750 feet high.

  RAINBOW MANIAC (Brazil)

  Thirteen men between the ages of 20 and 50 were murdered in Paturis Park in the Brazilian city of Carapicuíba (near Sao Paolo) between July 2007 and August 2008. Twelve were shot; one was beaten to death. The killer was dubbed the “Rainbow Maniac” in reference to the gay-pride rainbow symbol, because all the victims are believed to have been gay. Four months after the thirteenth murder, police announced they had arrested Jairo Francisco Franco, a retired Sao Paolo police officer, after a witness told them he’d seen Franco commit the crime on August 19, 2008. Another witness told police that Franco regularly visited the park seeking gay men. Shortly after Franco’s arrest, police inspector Paulo Fortunato told reporters, “We are convinced he is the ‘Rainbow Maniac’ we have been looking for.” But more than four years have passed, and Franco has yet to be charged with this or any crime. The case remains officially unsolved.

  HIGHWAY OF TEARS (Canada)

  From the 1970s to the present day, numerous women have been murdered or have simply gone missing on what has been dubbed the “Highway of Tears,” a remote 450-mile-long stretch of Highway 16 between the towns of Prince George and Prince Rupert in British Columbia. Royal Canadian Mounted Police say the number of women killed or missing there is 18, but Native leaders in the region (several victims were First Nations people) say the number is much higher, possibly even in the forties. While no one believes all of the murders are linked, police have indicated they believe a single serial killer is responsible for at least some, and possibly several, of the attacks. And while there have been many suspects in the case, nobody has ever been arrested.

  STONEMAN (India)

  This case spans two periods and two locations: The first, from 1985 to 1988 in Bombay; the second from June to December 1989 in Calcutta. During this time, 25 people were killed—12 in the first three-year span, and 13 more over just three months in Calcutta. The method in which “Stoneman” took his victims’ lives was especially macabre, and earned him (or her) that odd nickname. In all of the cases, someone crept up to a destitute person sleeping outside alone on a street or in an alley, and dropped a large stone—weighing around 50 pounds—on the victim’s head, crushing the person’s skull and killing the victim instantly. Indian police aren’t convinced that the two series of murders were carried out by the same person, saying instead that the Calcutta murders were probably carried out by a copycat killer. There has never been a suspect in the Stoneman cases.

  First U.S. city to host the summer Olympics: St. Louis, Missouri (1904).

  BIBLE JOHN (Scotland)

  Between February 1968 and October 1969, three women, aged 25, 29, and 32, were murdered in Glasgow, Scotland. Each had been raped and strangled. The clue that tied them together: All three victims were menstruating at the time of their deaths. Sanitary napkins or tampons had been placed near their bodies, and their purses—but not the contents of the purses—were stolen by their killer. And, most bizarrely, they had all met their murderer at the very same venue—the Barrowland Ballroom. According to police reports, several people actually saw the killer on the night of the third murder. Hellen Puttock, 29, had gone to Barrowland with her sister Jean. They met a man there who introduced himself as “John.” After spending more than an hour together at the club, the three left in a taxi. The taxi first dropped off Jean at her home and then dropped off Helen and the man at Helen’s home. Helen was found dead in her backyard the next day. Jean told police that the man had quoted the Old Testament during the taxi ride, leading the media to give him the name “Bible John.” Although several people saw the killer that night, no arrests were ever made.

  Update: In 2007 a Scottish man named Peter Tobin was convicted of the murders of three young women in Scotland and England between 1991 and 2007. Many people believe that Tobin—who lived in Glasgow until 1969 (he turned 23 that year)—is Bible John. This has not, however, been confirmed.

  NEW BEDFORD HIGHWAY KILLER (United States)

  For eleven harrowing months between July 1988 and June 1989, people in and around the town of New Bedford, Massachusetts, grew increasingly terrified as they heard over and over about the murder of yet another young woman. Before the killing spree ended, the bodies of nine women between the ages of 24 and 36 had been discovered along highways in the region. Two other women went missing in the same time period, and have never been seen since. All of the victims are believed to have been in rough circumstances: All were either prostitutes or drug addicts. There have been a handful of suspects in the case over the years, and one man, Kenneth Ponte, an attorney who had represented several of the women before their deaths, was charged with one of the murders. But, due to lack of evidence, Ponte was never brought to trial, and he died in 2009. The murders remain unsolved today.

  Archaeologists have found ancient mummies with metal braces on their teeth.

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  CONSUMER ELECTRO
NICS OF 1987

  Video Games: The video game market crashed in 1983 after games for the Atari console saturated the market. It came back in a big way in late 1986 when Nintendo launched the Nintendo Entertainment System. The first system available was the Deluxe Set, which came with a game console, two “control pads” (joysticks), a “light gun” for shooting games, the shooting game Duck Hunt, the puzzle game Gyromite, and ROB, a small robot that helped the player with Gyromite. Total cost: $249 ($500 today).

  Compact Discs: By 1987 compact discs were beginning to replace records and tapes as the dominant music format, with manufacturers shipping 100 million CDs. (Beatles albums were available on CD for the first time that February.) They still cost more than records or tapes, though—$10 on average, vs. $8 for a record or cassette. It would also cost you more to play them. One of the most popular CD players on the market in 1987 was the Magnavox CDB650, which cost $429, the equivalent of $900 today.

  Laptops: The first portable or “laptop” computer from IBM had just come on the market in 1987—the IBM PC Convertible. Running on an electrical cord or battery, it was the first IBM computer with the 3.5-inch disk drive that would soon become industry standard. It weighed 13 pounds, the screen was two-tone green, and it ran on 256 kilobytes of RAM. A typical computer in 2012 has 4 gigabytes of RAM—meaning it’s about 16,000 times more powerful than this laptop. Cost: $2,000, or $4,000 in today’s money.

  Men tend to navigate in cardinal directions (north/south); women more often use left/right.

  SCROGGIED

  On Page 314 we told you the story of how Charles Dickens got his inspiration for the character Ebenezer Scrooge from a real-life miser named John Elwes. But where did the name Ebenezer Scrooge come from? Here’s the tale of Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie, the man who is said to have inspired Dickens’s most memorable moniker.

  GRAVE INDICTMENT

  According to a story that surfaced in 1997, Dickens stumbled across an intriguing name in 1841 while visiting Edinburgh, Scotland, on a lecture tour. One evening when he had some time between public readings of his work, Dickens wandered through the Canongate Kirkyard (churchyard) along the city’s Royal Mile. There he found the grave of one Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie, who was described on his own tombstone as a “mean man,” in other words, a cheapskate.

  Dickens is said to have been stunned by the inscription. The man’s next of kin had gone to the trouble and expense of having his worst quality carved into his tombstone, making it an eternal reminder of what a flawed man he’d been. “I thought it was a grievous message for eternity,” he is said to have written. “‘Mean man’ was an advertisement of a shriveled soul.… This was the emblem of a life surely wasted.”

  Scroggie’s tombstone, the story goes, inspired Dickens to write A Christmas Carol, the story of man living just such a wasted life, who is given a chance to redeem himself. He already had John Elwes’s life story to draw from. By jiggling the spelling of Scroggie to get the more distinctive Scrooge, he christened the character that would become the most famous miser in all of English literature.

  MYTH-UNDERSTOOD

  The second part of the Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie tale is every bit as interesting as the first. It suggests that Dickens evidently did little or no research into the “mean man’s” life to find out what he was really like. He apparently didn’t get a really good look at the tombstone, either. Because if he had, he would have noticed that the tombstone didn’t say “mean man” at all. It said “meal man.”

  U.S. state with the most millionaires: California. As of 2010, there were more than 660,000.

  Ebenezer Scroggie (1772–1836) wasn’t a miser. He was a dealer in cornmeal.

  MR. FEZZIWIG

  In addition to dealing corn, he sold wine and spirits, and is credited with having talked the Royal Navy into buying stores of Scotch whisky in addition to their traditional drink, rum.

  Any similarities with the character Ebenezer Scrooge end there. Scroggie is said to have been a public-minded man. He served two terms as a town councilor in the city of Edinburgh. His contemporaries remembered him as a caring, generous, and fun-loving man, more like Scrooge’s fun-loving former employer, Mr. Fezziwig, than Scrooge himself. Scroggie loved to spend money and threw wild parties. He was also a notorious womanizer. He is said to have pinched the Countess of Mansfield on the bottom during a church meeting, and was twice reprimanded for lewd behavior with women in the Canongate Kirkyard, once with a widow named Anabella Cameron, another time with a servant girl named Maggie Synge.

  The second episode may have produced a child: Though Scroggie never admitted paternity, he did invite Maggie and her child to live with him. Scroggie never married Maggie Synge, but he did eventually wed one Griselda MacGregor, a widow. In 1826 he and Griselda are said to have written Love in Caledonia: A Guide to Marriage, “the nearest we have to a sex manual of the time.”

  GONE WITHOUT A TRACE

  Scroggie died in 1836 and was buried in the same churchyard that he’d earlier put to other use. His grave was a sturdy one, complete with iron bars to keep out “resurrectionists” (grave robbers who sold corpses to surgeons for dissection). But if you dream of retracing Dickens’s 1841 walk through the Canongate Kirkyard to Scroggie’s tombstone, you’re out of luck: His tombstone was removed in the 1930s during renovations and never replaced.

  When Uncle John first learned of the tale of Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie, he couldn’t help but wonder would have happened if Dickens had never stumbled across the tombstone. And what if he had read the tombstone correctly in the first place, or researched the life of Scroggie and realized he wasn’t a miser after all? Would Dickens ever have written A Christmas Carol? It’s difficult to imagine Christmas without it. But what Uncle John wondered most of all was how such a fascinating story could have been forgotten for more than 150 years, only to reappear in 1997, seemingly out of the blue. That seemed a little odd, so Uncle John e-mailed the Edinburgh Civic Trust, the city’s historical society, to learn more about it.

  At the game’s peak, Farmville “farmers” outnumbered real farmers in the U.S. by 60 to 1.

  END OF THE LINE

  And that’s when the story of the happy-go-lusty cornmeal dealer began to fall apart. “Interesting tale but not necessarily based in fact,” Euan Leitch, the Trust’s assistant director, wrote:

  There’s a notion that the story was created quite recently by someone to see how far you can spread an urban myth as there is no evidence of an Ebenezer Scroggie as a merchant in the post office directories for the period, the grave conveniently no longer exists and there is no parish burial record. I’ve also yet to see where the direct quote from Dickens comes from.

  Uncle John then did a little more digging and traced the story to its origin—an article by journalist Peter Clarke. In 1997 Clarke was writing for an adult magazine called The Erotic Review. The Review’s editor was a woman named Rowan Pelling, and as she related in a column in The Telegraph newspaper in 2012, when Clarke came to her with the story in 1997, even she wondered if it was too good to be true. Had Clarke made the whole thing up?

  Pelling concluded that he most likely had—that Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie was a figment of Clarke’s imagination, nothing more. “I find myself complicit in a probable Dickens hoax,” she admitted in 2012. “I published this literary ‘exclusive’ in 1997, in The Erotic Review. As we went to press, the facts were queried and it hit me that its author, Peter Clarke, was probably pulling my leg. No one could find any corroborating evidence, but it seemed a shame to let the facts obstruct a good yarn.”

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  “Money—in its absence we are coarse; in its presence we are vulgar.”

  —Mignon McLaughlin

  The first printing press in North America was used in Mexico City (1539).

  WEIRD NEWS

  Ninety-nine bottles of beer edition.

  REALITY BITES

  One night in July 2010, Australian Michel Newman, 36, on vacation in the remote to
wn of Broome, Western Australia, was thrown out of a pub for being too intoxicated. Unwilling to let that ruin his evening, Newman wandered over to the Broome Crocodile Park, where he climbed a fence and proceeded to sit on the back of “Fatso”—a 16-foot, 1,700-pound saltwater crocodile. Fatso immediately snapped around, latched his enormous jaws onto one of Newman’s legs, and…let him go. Bleeding profusely, Newman scrambled over the fence and headed back to the pub. He was taken to the hospital, where he made a full recovery. Park owner Malcolm Douglas was surprised that Newman had survived. “Saltwater crocodiles, once they get hold of you,” he said, “are not renowned for letting you go.” He said that the fact that it had been an unusually cool night may have made Fatso sluggish—and that was probably the only reason Newman was still alive.

  I (DON’T) HEAR THAT TRAIN A-COMIN’

  In 2012 a man camping in southeast British Columbia downed several beers, then took a stroll, came upon a railroad track, lay down between the rails, and fell asleep. Minutes later, a 26-car train roared down the track. The conductor spotted the man and blasted the train’s horn. He didn’t move. The driver slammed on the brakes, generating a long, deafening metal-on-metal screech. He still didn’t move. All 26 cars of the train rolled over him. The conductor and other train workers ran back to the spot, expecting to find a dead person (or pieces of one)—and were stunned to find the man, intact and alive, still between the rails. They nudged him. “He got up,” RCMP Sgt. Dave Dubnyk told reporters, “grabbed his beer and walked away.” Police found the man at the nearby campground. “I can’t imagine being so passed out that you wouldn’t hear a train,” Sgt. Dubnyk said, “but if he had, and the train had startled him into sitting up, it would have been tragic.” The still-intoxicated man was taken to jail for the night…for his own safety.