Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  FIRST WOMAN ELECTED GOVERNOR: 1924

  In 1917, “Farmer Jim” Ferguson, governor of Texas, was impeached and booted out of office. Seven years later his wife, M. A. “Ma” Ferguson, ran as Farmer Jim’s surrogate. She won, and was elected again in 1932.

  FIRST WOMAN ELECTED TO THE U.S. SENATE: 1932

  When Senator Thaddeus Caraway died in 1931, the governor of Arkansas appointed Caraway’s wife, Hattie, to the seat...after making her promise she wouldn’t seek reelection. She changed her mind, ran for the office on her own, and won two full terms.

  California was the first state to send two women to the U.S. Senate at the same time.

  THE FIRST WOMAN CABINET MEMBER: 1933

  When FDR was governor of New York, Frances Perkins—a reformer committed to improving working conditions—was his state industrial commissioner. When Roosevelt became president, he appointed her Secretary of Labor. Perkins’s legacy includes social security, unemployment insurance, and minimum wages.

  FIRST WOMAN TO SERVE IN BOTH HOUSES OF CONGRESS: 1949

  When Rep. Clyde Smith died in 1940, his wife Margaret won a special election to take his place. She won three full terms on her own, then ran successfully for the Senate in 1948. This made her only the second woman elected to a full term in the Senate...and the first elected to the Senate without following her husband. She served four terms. She also became the first woman to stage a serious run for the presidential nomination of a major political party (Republican, in 1964).

  FIRST WOMAN TO HAVE AN ELECTORAL VOTE CAST FOR HER: 1973

  Theodora Nathan, Libertarian Party VP candidate, got it.

  FIRST WOMAN GOVERNOR ELECTED WITHOUT SUCCEEDING HER HUSBAND: 1974

  A former Connecticut state legislator and the secretary of state, Rep. Ella Grasso was elected to two terms. She resigned in 1981, a few months before dying of cancer.

  FIRST WOMAN ON THE U.S. SUPREME COURT: 1981

  Although Sandra Day O’Connor graduated third in her class at Stanford Law School in 1952, she was only offered a job as a legal secretary. By the mid-’70s she’d been an Arizona state senator (R), a state deputy attorney general, and a Superior Court judge. In 1975 she was appointed to the Arizona Court of Appeals, and in 1981 President Reagan picked her for the Supreme Court.

  FIRST WOMAN VICE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE FOR A MAJOR POLITICAL PARTY: 1984

  Rep. Geraldine A. Ferraro (D-New York) was chosen by Walter Mondale as his running mate.

  America has three times as many animal shelters as shelters for victims of domestic violence.

  IF HEARTACHES WERE WINE

  Are you a fan of country-western music? Here are some toe-tappin’ titles picked by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for their “Annual All Time Best of the Worst Country Song Titles.”

  “Get Your Tongue Outta My Mouth ’Cause I’m Kissing You Goodbye”

  “You’re a Cross I Can’t Bear”

  “Mama Get the Hammer (There’s a Fly On Papa’s Head)”

  “She Made Toothpicks Out of the Timber of My Heart”

  “You’re the Reason Our Kids Are So Ugly”

  “If Fingerprints Showed Up on Skin, Wonder Whose I’d Find on You”

  “It Ain’t Love, but It Ain’t Bad”

  “I’ve Been Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart”

  “I’m the Only Hell Mama Ever Raised”

  “I Got in at 2 with a 10 and Woke Up at 10 with a 2”

  “I Don’t Know Whether to Come Home or Go Crazy” (Not to be confused with “I Don’t Know Whether to Kill Myself or Go Bowling”)

  “If You See Me Gettin’ Smaller, It’s Cause I’m Leavin’ You.”

  “If Heartaches Were Wine (I’d Be Drunk All the Time)”

  “If You Can’t Feel It (It Ain’t There)”

  “Touch Me with More than Your Hands”

  “I’ve Got the Hungries for Your Love and I’m Waiting in Your Welfare Line”

  “The Last Word in Lonesome Is ’Me’”

  “I’ll Marry You Tomorrow but Let’s Honeymoon Tonite”

  “When We Get Back to the Farm (That’s When We Really Go to Town)”

  “You Stuck My Heart in an Old Tin Can and Shot It Off a Log”

  “Why Do You Believe Me When I Tell You That I Love You, When You Know I’ve Been a Liar Ail My Life?”

  “He’s Been Drunk Since His Wife’s Gone Punk”

  When George Washington died in 1799, Napoleon ordered 10 days of mourning in France.

  MUMMY’S THE WORD

  Mummies are as much a part of American pop culture as they are a part of Ancient Egyptian culture. But how much do you know about them?

  RAG TIME

  As long as there have been people in Egypt, there have been mummies—not necessarily man-made mummies, but mummies nonetheless. The extreme conditions of the desert environment guaranteed that any corpse exposed to the elements for more than a day or two dried out completely, a process that halted decomposition in its tracks.

  The ancient Egyptian culture that arose on the banks of the Nile River believed very strongly in preserving human bodies, which they believed were as necessary a part of the afterlife as they were a part of daily life. The formula was simple: no body, no afterlife—you couldn’t have one without the other. The only problem: As Egyptian civilization advanced and burial tombs became increasingly elaborate, bodies also became more insulated from the very elements—high temperatures and dry air—that made natural preservation possible in the first place.

  The result was that a new science emerged: artificial mummification. From 3100 B.C. to 649 A.D., the ancient Egyptians deliberately mummified the bodies of their dead, using methods that became more sophisticated and successful over time.

  MUMMY SECRETS

  Scientists have yet to unlock all of the secrets of Egyptian mummification, but they have a pretty good idea of how the process worked:

  • When a king or other high official died, the embalmers slit open the body and removed nearly all the organs, which they preserved separately in special ceremonial jars. A few of the important organs, like the heart and kidneys, were left in place. The Egyptians apparently thought the brain was useless and in most cases they shredded it with small hooks inserted through the nostrils, pulled it out the nose using tiny spoons, and then threw it away.)

  Some Egyptian mummies wore dentures.

  • Next, the embalmers packed the body in oil of cedar (similar to turpentine) and natron, a special mineral with a high salt content. The chemicals slowly dried the body out, a process that took from 40 to 70 days.

  • The body was now completely dried out and “preserved,” but the process invariably left it shrunken and wrinkled like a prune, so the next step was to stuff the mouth, nose, chest cavities, etc., with sawdust, pottery, cloth, and other items to fill it out and make it look more human. In many cases the eyes were removed and artificial ones put in their place.

  • Then the embalmers doused the body with a waterproofing substance similar to tar, which protected the dried body from moisture. In fact, the word mummy comes from the Persian word mumiai, which means “pitch” or “asphalt,” and was originally used to describe the preservatives themselves, not the corpse that had been preserved.

  • Finally, the body was carefully wrapped in narrow strips of linen and a funerary mask resembling the deceased was placed on the head. Afterwards it was placed in a large coffin that was also carved and painted to look like the deceased, and the coffin was placed in a tomb outfitted with the everyday items that the deceased would need in the afterlife.

  THE MUMMY GLUT

  Pharaohs weren’t the only ancient Egyptians who were mummified—nearly anyone in Egyptian society who could afford it had it done. The result: By the end of the Late Period of Ancient Egypt in the seventh century A.D., the country contained an estimated 500 million mummies, far more than anyone knew what to do with. They were too numerous to count, too disconnected from modern Egyptian life to have an
y sacred spiritual value, and in most cases were thought to be too insignificant to be worthy of study. Egyptians from the 1100s onward thought of them as more of a natural resource than as the bodies of distant relatives, and treated them as such.

  Well into the 19th century, mummies were used as a major fuel source for locomotives of the Egyptian railroad, which bought them by the ton (or by the graveyard). They were cheaper than wood and burned very well.

  What country do Americans look up most often in the World Book Encyclopedia? Canada.

  For more than 400 years, mummies were one of Egypt’s largest export industries, and the supply was so plentiful that by 1600 you could buy a pound of mummy powder in Scotland for about 8 shillings. As early as 1100 A.D., Arabs and Christians ground them up for use as medicine, which was often rubbed into wounds, mixed into food, or stirred into tea.

  By the 1600s, the medicinal use of mummies began to decline, as many doctors began to question the practice. “Not only does this wretched drug do no good to the sick,” the French surgeon Ambrose Paré wrote in his medical journal, “...but it causes them great pain in their stomach, gives them evil smelling breath, and brings on serious vomiting which is more likely to stir up the blood and worsen hemorrhaging than to stop it.” He recommended using mummies as fish bait.

  By the 1800s, mummies were imported only as curiosities, where it was fashionable to unwrap them during dinner parties.

  Mummies were also one of the first sources of recycled paper: During one 19th-century rag shortage (in the days when paper was made from cloth fibers, not wood fibers), one Canadian paper manufacturer literally imported Egyptian mummies as a source of raw materials: he unwrapped the cloth and made it into sturdy brown paper, which he sold to butchers and grocers for use as a food wrap. The scheme died out after only a few months, when employees in charge of unwrapping them began coming down with cholera.

  Note: What happened when the supply of mummies became scarce? A grisly “instant mummy” industry sprang up in which fresh corpses of criminals and beggars were hastily embalmed and sold as real mummies.)

  MUMMY FACTS

  • Scientists in South America have discovered mummies from the ancient civilization of Chinchorros that are more than 7,800 years old—nearly twice as old as the oldest Egyptian mummy. And, just as in Egypt, the mummies are plentiful there. “Every time we dug in the garden or dug to add a section to our house, we found bodies,” one elderly South American woman told Discover magazine. “But I got used to it. We’d throw their bones out on a hill, and the dogs would take them away.”

  Among many other things, Thomas Jefferson is the inventor of the calendar clock.

  • The average Egyptian mummy contains more than 20 layers of cloth that, laid end-to-end, would be more than four football fields long.

  • In 1977, an Egyptian scientist discovered that the mummy of Pharaoh Ramses II, more than 3,000 years old, was infested with beetles. So they sent it to France for treatment, complete with an Egyptian passport describing his occupation as “King, deceased.”

  • What’s the quickest way to tell if an Egyptian mummy still has its brains? Shake the skull—if it rattles, the brain is still in there.

  • The Egyptians were also fond of mummifying animals. To date, scientists have discovered the preserved remains of bulls, cats, baboons, birds, crocodiles, fish, scorpions, insects...even wild dogs. One tomb contained the remains of more than one million mummified birds.

  • Some mummies have been discovered in coffins containing chicken bones. Some scientists believe the bones have special religious meaning, but (no kidding) other experts theorize that the bones are actually leftover garbage from the embalmer’s lunch.

  CELEBRITY MUMMIES

  Jeremy Bentham and his “Auto Icon.” Bentham was a famous 19th-century English philosopher. When he died in 1832, he left instructions with a surgeon friend that his body be beheaded, mummified, dressed in his everyday clothes, and propped up in a chair, and that a wax head be placed on his neck to give the corpse a more realistic appearance. He further instructed that his real head also be mummified and placed at his feet, and that the whole arrangement be put on public display. The corpse and its head(s) can still be seen at University College in London, where they sit in a glass case specially built for that purpose.

  Vladimir Lenin. When the Soviet leader died on January 21, 1924, the Communist Party assembled a team of top embalmers to preserve his corpse for all eternity. Unlike the embalming processes of the ancient Egyptians, which prevented decomposition by removing body fluids, the Soviets replaced cell fluids with liquids that inhibited deterioration.

  A column of air one inch square and 600 miles high weighs about 15 lbs.

  WHY YOUR FEET SMELL

  This is dedicated to our good friend Pete McCracken. It originally appeared as an article in Health magazine. It’s written by Teo Furtado.

  My wife and I sat crosslegged beside a litter of puppies. I knew what she was thinking. “We’re not taking one, no matter how cute he is,” I told her.

  “That’s fine,” she said. “I don’t want one either. Just another animal in the house to train.”

  And without another word, she selected a furrowed, sad-eyed, seven-week-old yellow Labrador retriever and placed him at my bare feet. The pup sniffed my toes excitedly and began to lick them. I was smitten. How could I resist a dog that actually liked the way my feet smelled? Ten years later, Boris still takes to my toes without the least hint of repugnance.

  TRUE CONFESSIONS

  Like lots of other people I’ve always been self-conscious about the bouquet of my feet. No wonder books on hygiene refer to smelly feet—bromidrosis, in medical jargon—as “the social disease” or “the unmentionable.” Funny, when I was growing up, no one in my family ever had trouble mentioning it.

  My brothers and I were in a no-win situation. While watching TV, we weren’t allowed to put our feet up on the cocktail table with our shoes on. But taking our shoes off raised a loud...protest from my sisters. As they pinched their noses and gagged dramatically, they wiggled their toes in smug, odorless condescension.

  IT’S THE SHOES!

  Fortunately, we can take some comfort in the knowledge that the source of all this social angst isn’t our feet; it’s the shoes we wear. “There’s no such thing as foot odor,” says William Rossi, a podiatrist who’s written extensively on foot problems. “There’s only shoe odor. Just look at societies in which people go unshod. You never hear of foot odor problems.”

  Yes, it’s civilization that’s to blame—never mind the fact that there are more than a quarter of a million sweat glands in a pair of feet. That’s more than in any other part of the human body, including the underarms.

  If your dog has fleas, put flea powder in your vacuum cleaner bag. (Lots of flea eggs there.)

  The glands release about one gallon of moisture every week, but there’s no problem so long as you’re roaming around barefoot, says Rossi: Most of the sweat simply evaporates when your feet go through the world au naturel.

  IF THE SHOE FITS...

  All that changes when you confine a foot in a shoe. The buildup of sweat creates a nearly unlimited food supply for hungry bacteria, with salt, vitamins, glucose, fatty acids and lactic acid—nutritious stuff for the nearly six trillion bacteria that thrive on our feet.

  With so much food and housing available, the organisms are fruitful and multiply. The food is digested; what’s not used is broken down and excreted.

  “You mean that the smell is bacterial poop?” I asked Rossi.

  “Something like that,” he responded.

  THE CULPRITS

  Researchers recently discovered that the main culprits in shoe odor are micrococci, bacteria that break sweat down into sulfur compounds that smell like rotten eggs or Limburger cheese.

  How to attack them?

  ODOR EATERS

  There are plenty of over-the-counter remedies, but University of Pennsylvania microbiolo
gist Ken McGinley advises some skepticism. It’s true that foot powders absorb sweat and antiperspirant sprays cut down on its production. But, says McGinley...neither product adequately reduces the offending microbe’s numbers because micrococci don’t need as much moisture as other bacteria to survive.

  Before you make that trip to the drugstore, there are some simpler—and usually more effective—solutions to try. First, the Imelda Marcos approach.

  “Avoid wearing the same shoes over and over again,” Rossi says.

  Even if you don’t have a roomful of shoes to choose from, rotate the ones you do wear. Each pair should air out for at least twenty-four hours between uses, says Rossi.

  The U.S. generates 30% of the world’s nuclear power. France is #2 at 17%.

  That advice, I figure, partly explains why my sisters didn’t have bromidrosis: They simply changed shoes more often to match different outfits. The boys wore the same clodhoppers over and over again. Yet researchers say it’s particularly important for men to rotate their shoes, because—silly as it sounds—they have larger toes that often stick together, making it harder for sweat to evaporate.

  PLAYING HARDBALL

  If a favorite pair of shoes is excessively odoriferous, Rossi offers a tip to try before you toss them out: sterilization. Roll some blotting paper into a cylinder to make a wick, and insert it partway into a small jar of formaldehyde (available at any pharmacy). Then place the jar and the shoes inside a cardboard box, tape the box shut, and put it into a closet or garage for a day or two. After taking the shoes out, be sure to let them dry overnight before you wear them again.

  Here’s a special list of dating tips from the 1950s, just for girls!

  THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF GOOD CONDUCT

  1.Be a teen with taste, dressing appropriately for the occasion.

  2.Act like a lady and he will treat you as such.

  3.Be able to enjoy an everyday date as well as the glamour occasions.