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

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  Vatican City is the only nation in the world that can lock its gates at night.

  PRESIDENT CONAN O’BRIEN

  …president of Harvard Lampoon magazine, that is. Here are a few more who went on to bigger things.

  BACKGROUND

  The Harvard Lampoon, founded more than 130 years ago in 1876, is the longest-running continuously published humor magazine in the world. A list of its writers through the years reads like a who’s who of accomplished people, including William Randolph Hearst (newspaper publisher), George Santayana (philosopher), Patricia Marx (New Yorker and Saturday Night Live writer—and first woman elected to the Lampoon staff, in 1971), P. J. O’Rourke (political satirist), Al Franken (U.S. Senator), and Etan Cohen (Beavis and Butthead writer). The Harvard Lampoon is a magazine, but it’s also a fraternal organization of sorts, so presidents are elected by a vote of the staff. Many presidents went on to live some pretty remarkable lives.

  PRESIDENT JOHN REED (1910)

  Reed was born to an upper-class Portland, Oregon, family and entered Harvard in 1906 (fellow students included two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning author and journalist Walter Lippmann, and poet T. S. Eliot). He joined the debating club, dramatic club, cheerleading squad, banjo club, mandolin club, glee club, and water polo team, and in the meantime studied to be a writer. In his junior year he became an editor of the Lampoon, and in his senior year its president. “Under Reed’s term as president,” according to the magazine’s website, “the Lampoon evolved from salacious puns and localized ‘Harvard humor’ to highly literate, scathing social commentary.”

  After leaving Harvard, Reed established himself as one of the country’s most popular freelance journalists (and poets). He also became a Communist. In 1917 Reed traveled to Russia to report on the Communist revolution, returned in 1918, was charged with sedition in 1919, fled the United States, and in 1920 died in Moscow. He then became one of the very few Americans ever to be buried at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, the honored burial ground for heroes of the Communist revolution.

  The red carpet at the Oscars is about 500 feet long and 33 feet wide.

  PRESIDENT GEORGE PLIMPTON (1949)

  Plimpton grew up on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue and attended a series of elite schools, where he excelled at sports—but not in the classroom—and entered Harvard in 1944. (“It was a little easier to get into Harvard in those days,” he remarked years later.) He joined the elite Porcellian Club—the Harvard equivalent of Yale’s Skull and Bones—where he met writers and became interested in writing himself. Before long he was contributing to the Lampoon, and in his senior year was elected its president.

  Plimpton graduated in 1950, and in 1952 he moved to Paris, where he co-founded the Paris Review, one of the world’s most highly regarded literary magazines. Around this time he began specializing in a unique genre of non-fiction writing. He would become or play the part of something that most people never get a chance to do—usually involving sports—and then write about the experience. Examples: He fought bulls in Spain, pitched in a Major League Baseball All-Star Game, boxed against world light-heavyweight champion Archie Moore, participated in a flying trapeze act, and, in his most famous role, played quarterback for the NFL’s Detroit Lions, which he wrote about in the book Paper Lion. (Alan Alda played Plimpton in the 1968 film version.) He also acted, appearing in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), L.A. Story (1991), and Good Will Hunting (1997). Plimpton continued to work, including editing the Paris Review, until his death in 2003 at age 76.

  PRESIDENT FRED GWYNNE (1950)

  The son of a Wall Street broker, Frederick Hubbard Gwynne entered Harvard in 1947. He was a gifted illustrator and worked as a cartoonist for the Lampoon before moving on to writing, and then became president. He was also a gifted singer (and part of the Harvard Krokodiloes a capella group) and actor (in the school’s esteemed Hasty Pudding theatrical society).

  After graduating, Gwynne moved to New York, found work on Broadway, and got his first movie part as an uncredited gang member in 1954’s On the Waterfront with Marlon Brando. In 1961 he got his first big television role, co-starring in the sitcom Car 54, Where Are You?, and in 1964 the 6'5″ Gwynne landed his best-known role—the Frankenstein-ish Herman Munster on The Munsters. (He hated it because of the three-hour makeup sessions and 40 pounds of padding he had to wear.) Gwynne continued to act, write, and draw—he wrote and illustrated several acclaimed children’s books—until his death at age 66 in 1993. His last role: a critically acclaimed performance as Judge Chamberlain Haller in 1992’s My Cousin Vinnie.

  According to the U.S. census, one in three Americans adults are unmarried.

  PRESIDENT LISA HENSON (1981)

  Henson, the daughter of Muppets creator Jim Henson, grew up in Westchester County, outside New York City. She entered Harvard in 1979 as a math major. A natural storyteller, she soon changed her major to mythology and folklore. During her freshman year she attended a recital by Lampoon president Andy Borowitz, who read a limerick “that involved Muppets performing sexual acts,” Henson told The Harvard Crimson, the school’s newspaper, in 2007. That got her interested in the Lampoon. She started working for it doing art and design work—which she had learned from her father—and by her senior year was such an integral part of the organization that she was elected its first female president.

  After graduation she was hired by Warner Bros., where she worked on such films as the Lethal Weapon series, Batman in 1989, and Free Willy in 1993—by which time she was vice president. She then went to Columbia Pictures, where she became president. Today she’s CEO of the Jim Henson Company, where she has led production of several hit TV shows, including Dinosaur Train and Sid the Science Kid.

  PRESIDENT CONAN O’BRIEN (1983–84)

  O’Brien was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1963, graduated from Brookline High School—as class valedictorian—in 1981, and entered Harvard in 1982. He quickly became one of the Lampoon’s major writers, and was elected its president in his sophomore and junior years, making him only the second person in the magazine’s history to serve as its president twice. (The other was humorist Robert Benchley, class of 1912.) If you’re a fan, you probably already know about his career after Harvard: writing for Not Necessarily the News, Saturday Night Live, and The Simpsons; hosting Late Night With Conan O’Brien on NBC for 16 years; infamously replacing Jay Leno on The Tonight Show for just seven months before being re-replaced…by Jay Leno; and hosting a cable TV show, Conan. Something you may not know is that while O’Brien was president of the Lampoon, he and his fellow “pooners,” as they are called, played a number of pranks on their longtime rivals—the staff of The Harvard Crimson. These included an early morning theft of the entire print run of the Crimson (during which O’Brien was arrested) and a Lampoon edition that included a fake phone-sex ad with the dorm room phone number of the Crimson’s president, Jeff Zucker. Who’s he? The guy who became president of NBC in 2007—and oversaw the Conan O’Brien/Tonight Show debacle. (He’s also the guy who called the police on O’Brien for taking all the Crimson newspapers.) So was the Tonight Show mess payback for President Conan O’Brien’s prankster days at the Lampoon? We’ll probably never know.

  Britain’s Queen Victoria loved Valentine’s Day cards. During her reign, she sent nearly 2,500.

  * * *

  HE’S A REAL HOTHEAD

  “A Georgia man was taken to a hospital in critical condition in 2012 after he allegedly encouraged his friends to set his head on fire at a bar by dousing him with 100-proof booze, police said. The 36-year-old man had originally phoned police to report several attackers had lit his head on fire, but police later learned otherwise by watching surveillance video captured at Allie Katz Bar in Augusta. Footage showed it took the man’s friends two attempts to ignite the Bacardi 151 on his head before he rushed around the bar with his entire head ablaze. ‘The man who was set on fire bet his friends that he was drinking with that he could set his face on fire. Obviously no one believed him an
d he proved them wrong,’ Lt. Blaise Dresser told WJBF-TV. The man was released from hospital and police said he won’t be charged because he’s suffered enough.”

  —ABC News

  There are more than 10,000 distinct religious groups worldwide.

  “THIS PLACE IS A TOILET”

  Normally when someone refers to a house, restaurant, or some other place as a “toilet,” it’s an insult. Sometimes it’s just the truth.

  OUT OF ORDER

  You might not believe it when you can’t find a restroom after a night of pub crawling in London or some other British city, but during the Victorian era, Great Britain was known for the quantity and quality of its public toilets. Great numbers of them were built in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Some were free-standing buildings of brick or stone while others were just below ground level, accessible via stairs. Many were quite ornate by modern standards.

  Quite a few of these structures still stand, although they have fallen on hard times, victims of vandalism, shrinking government budgets, and plumbing that’s now more than a century old. Some municipalities have stopped providing access to public restrooms altogether; others have found that it’s cheaper to build new facilities than to modernize the old ones and make them accessible to disabled people. So what do you do with all those antique rest-rooms? Many have been converted to new—and fascinating—uses.

  EASTVILLE PHARMACY

  Location: Bristol

  Story: For many years, Bristol’s Eastville neighborhood didn’t have a drugstore, which meant that residents, many of whom did not own cars, had to go miles out of their way to get prescriptions filled. In 2011 a businessman named Naveed Sahoor opened a pharmacy in a long-abandoned public toilet, one whose doors and windows had been bricked up for years. Sahoor spent £100,000 ($155,000) ripping out toilets and urinals and converting the building to its new purpose. He kept the TOILET signs “as a reminder of the building’s history.” Bonus: Because the neighborhood is home to a large South Asian population, customers can have their prescriptions filled by staffers speaking Urdu, Punjabi, or Hindi as well as English. “I am pleased with how the building looks and the quality of the premises,” Sahoor said when his toilet pharmacy opened in July 2011.

  In 1999 the Grateful Dead’s caterer, Charlie Ayers, became Google’s first company chef.

  THE BAY CAFÉ

  Location: Canvey Island, Essex

  Story: Barbara Power and Alan Stanard have been significant others for more than 30 years. But in 2009 Stanard, 59, became too sick to walk, so Power decided to convert a public restroom on the Canvey seafront into a health-food café. The couple borrowed £50,000 (about $78,500) to remake the toilet into a café with seating for 32 and an open kitchen that allows customers to watch their food being prepared. (The local council approved the change, provided that Power make the café’s restroom available to the public.)

  TEMPLE OF CONVENIENCE

  Location: Manchester

  Story: This small subterranean men’s room beneath Manchester’s Great Bridgewater Street has been reborn as a tiny—but popular—music bar. No band? No problem: The jukebox has one of the best selections of music in the city, and there’s a great selection of beers as well. Get there early if you want a seat; they go fast. “This is the best bar in a toilet that I have ever been to,” one customer wrote in an online review. “If you are one of the lucky smug few to get a seat then you can while away a cozy and intimate evening laughing at those fools who came to the toilet too late.”

  CORE BAR AND GRILL

  Location: Southport, Merseyside

  Story: Who says underground toilets have to be small? (Or toilets?) In 2002 the drainage problems in a large subterranean restroom in Southport got so bad that the local government solicited bids to fill the entire space with concrete. One of the bidders, Mark Ashton, thought it made more sense to fill the bathroom with paying customers, so he proposed converting it into a tapas bar. The council liked the idea so much that it awarded Ashton and his partner, Paul Townsend, a 125-year lease. The duo fixed the drainage problem, spent £300,000 (about $450,000) ripping out the plumbing and then remodeled the interior into a restaurant large enough to seat 100. When Core opened in 2005, Townsend predicted that the bar’s unconventional history would be good for business: “It was always going to be in people’s minds that they were toilets. Some customers do come in and say, ‘That’s where I used to pee.’” He was right: The bar is still in business.

  Older than you think: The phrase “kiss my___” dates back to at least 1705.

  THEATRE OF SMALL CONVENIENCE

  Location: Malverne

  Story: Opened by a puppeteer and part-time social worker named Dennis Neale in 1999, the theater was built in a wedge-shaped men’s room that’s 6 feet wide at one end, 10 feet wide at the other, and 16 feet long on the sides. Neale spent two years constructing the small but ornate venue, fitting it with intricate woodwork, murals on the ceiling and walls, seating for 12, and a five-foot stage at the narrow end. Over the years, the theater has been used for plays, poetry readings, musical performances, and Neale’s eight-minute puppet shows, which he performs upon request every Saturday. In 2002 Guinness World Records recognized the playhouse as the smallest commercial theater in the world.

  PUBLIC LIFE

  Location: London

  Story: Opened in 2000, Public Life is a bar, Internet cafe, and art space in a former men’s room beneath Commercial Street, which separates the East End from the financial district. In the early 1990s, artist/activist Siraj Izhar used the abandoned restroom, then a popular haunt for junkies and prostitutes, as a free space for performance art. Why the toilet? He didn’t have the money to do anything else. In 1995 he paired up with a financier named Neil Bell, who, with the help of public grants and donations from supporters, raised $290,000 to bring Public Life to life. The tile walls and checkerboard marble floor are original; the bar, LED lighting, and everything else is new. “Internet connectivity, plus a lively mix of neighborhood types, including bankers and prostitutes, are a part of the space’s urban design,” says the New York Times.

  THE LOOKOUT

  Location: Scarborough, Yorkshire

  Story: Tracy Woodhouse and Graham Peck had long admired the boarded-up public toilet built into a cliff overlooking Scarborough’s North Bay. Whenever the couple walked past the dilapidated building with its beautiful stonework, Peck would talk about fixing it up. They got their chance in 2005, when the local government council offered the building for lease. Woodhouse and Peck put £15,000 down (about $27,000) for a seven-year lease and negotiated an additional 21-year lease for £1,800 ($3,200) a year. They spent an additional £35,000 ($64,000) converting the toilet into a one-bedroom home. Working on the project in their spare time, they finished in 2010 and named their new home the Lookout. (Get it? The Loo–kout.)

  First cat in outer space: Felicette, launched by the French in 1963. (She survived.)

  What once was the ladies’ room now serves as Woodhouse and Peck’s bedroom and bathroom. The men’s room is now the living room, with a TV set where the urinals used to be. “Some people joke about it,” Woodhouse told the Daily Mail in 2010. “At work they’ll say things like, ‘Oh yes, you’re the couple who live in a lavatory.’ But we now have a lovely little house with a sea view that used to be a loo.” The Lookout has become a Scarborough tourist site, especially among visitors old enough to remember when the bathrooms were still in operation…and now assume they’ve re-opened. “We can be watching TV or washing the dishes and suddenly a face will peer through the window. I don’t know who’s more surprised, them or us,” Peck says.

  * * *

  A VERY LONG SENTENCE

  In 1976 Dudley Wayne Kyzer, 40, of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, was sentenced to death after being convicted of three murders. But four years later his conviction was overturned, he was retried, convicted again, and this time sentenced to two life sentences plus 10,000 years—the longest sentence ever imposed in t
he United States, according to Guinness World Records. Because of quirks in Alabama’s sentencing laws, Kyzer became eligible for parole after ten years, and has been eligible every five years since then (they last turned him down in 2010), so his 10,000-year sentence still stands, which means, as of 2012 he still has 9,969 years left to go. He’ll be out in the year 11981.

  22% percent of all twins are left-handed. General population: 12%.

  HUMAN GUINEA PIGS

  Sometimes real-life scientists make the “mad” scientists from the movies look downright sane.

  THE MONSTER STUDY

  In 1939 Wendell Johnson, a speech pathologist at the University of Iowa, directed graduate student Mary Tudor in an experiment on six children, aged 5 to 15. For six months Tudor visited the kids (who lived in a nearby orphange) and conducted classes with them—and whenever they spoke she told them they had terrible speaking voices. She did this again and again. Why? To see if she could turn the kids—all of whom had perfectly normal speaking voices—into stutterers, thereby proving Johnson’s hypothesis that stuttering is caused by conditioning rather than congenital defect. None of the kids became stutterers, but according to Tudor’s own notes, all of them became afraid and ashamed to speak.

  When the experiment was over, Tudor simply left. The children were never told anything. Johnson’s peers were aghast when they heard what he’d done and dubbed his work “The Monster Study.”

  Update: The results were concealed for decades, but in 2001 they were discovered by a journalist. Later that year the University of Iowa issued a formal apology for the experiment. In 2007 three of the test subjects, along with the estates of the other three, were awarded $925,000 by the State of Iowa for what all described as the lifelong scars they suffered as a result of the “Monster Study.”