Uncle John's Actual and Factual Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  “It’s difficult to overstate the role of this letter,” lead researcher Dr. David Juurlink told CBS News in 2017. “It was the key bit of literature that helped the opiate manufacturers convince front-line doctors that addiction is not a concern.”

  WINNERS OF THE DIAGRAM PRIZE FOR ODDEST BOOK TITLE

  1978: Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice

  1983: Unsolved Problems of Modern Theory of Lengthwise Rolling

  1984: The Book of Marmalade: Its Antecedents, Its History, and Its Role in the World Today

  1986: Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality

  1993: American Bottom Archaeology

  1994: Highlights in the History of Concrete

  1998: Developments in Dairy Cow Breeding: New Opportunities to Widen the Use of Straw

  1999: Weeds in a Changing World: British Crop Protection Council Symposium Proceedings No. 64

  2000: Designing High Performance Stiffened Structures

  2001: Butterworths Corporate Manslaughter Service

  2002: Living with Crazy Buttocks

  2008: The 2009–2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais

  2009: Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes

  2010: Managing a Dental Practice: The Genghis Khan Way

  2012: Goblinproofing One’s Chicken Coop

  2014: Strangers Have the Best Candy

  2015: Too Naked for the Nazis

  2016: The Commuter Pig Keeper: A Comprehensive Guide to Keeping Pigs when Time Is Your Most Precious Commodity

  The Fugio Cent, the first copper penny minted in the United States (1787), bore the motto “MIND YOUR BUSINESS.”

  TAKE ME OUT TO

  THE BA’ GAME

  For almost 200 years, the Uppies and the Doonies have met in Scotland annually to do battle in the Ba’.

  AN UNTRADITIONAL TRADITION

  Located at latitude 58° on the North Sea, Kirkwall is the capital of Scotland’s Orkney Islands. Orcadians, who number about 20,000 on the archipelago of 70 islands, are more Viking than Scots. Every year since around 1800, they’ve taken time off from farming and fishing to compete (or cheer for their side) in one of the islands’ most sacred traditions—the Game of Ba’. The game is sort of like rugby except that there are no uniforms, no referees, and no rules—just two teams, two goals, and a handmade leather ball stuffed with cork dust, weighing about three pounds.

  The two teams are called the Uppies and the Doonies. The Uppies are the Orkadians born “above the gate,” or north of St. Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall. Their goal is to get the ba’ (the ball) to touch the wall at the south end of town. The Doonies are born “below the gate,” or south of the cathedral. Their goal is to get the ba’ north to the sea and into the water. You are born an Uppie or a Doonie, and that is your team for life. Moving to a different part of town makes no difference; you cannot change sides. Each team is made of about 150 men over the age of 16—no females allowed. (There was a women’s ba’ in 1945 and 1946, but that was abandoned because the women played as rough as the men, and it wasn’t deemed “ladylike.”) Many team members have been playing for more than 20 years.

  ON YOUR MARK, GET SET…

  Shortly before 1:00 p.m. on Christmas Day and again on New Year’s Day, everyone from grannies in wheelchairs and couples with babies in strollers gathers at the Kirk Green in front of St. Magnus Cathedral, where the game will begin. They cheer as the two teams march from above and below the green to meet at the Mercat Cross. Players are dressed in sweaters, torn jerseys and jeans duct-taped tightly around the ankles of their work boots. They press together in a massive circle waiting for a Kirkwall VIP to do “the throw up.” As the cathedral bell chimes one, that person kisses the ba’, tosses it into the air, and the scrum begins.

  In 1989 a new league began: the Senior Professional Baseball Association. It struck out in 1990.

  ANYTHING GOES

  Three hundred men, all with their hands waving in the air, surge toward the player who has caught the ba’. They can stay pressed in this tight mob for as long as an hour, wrestling the ba’ back and forth. When a ba’ carrier finally breaks away, the scrum follows—up alleys, down streets, and through the crowd of spectators. To prevent glass windows from being obliterated by the crush of 300 men pushing full strength in one direction or another, every storefront is boarded up with thick wooden railings. This includes gas pumps at filling stations. As the mob surges in one direction, spectators leap onto railings, duck into doorways, and even take shelter in the red phone booths to avoid being crushed in the melee. Once the mob passes, the crowd follows, shouting to stragglers behind them, “They’re heading doon Castle Street!” or “They’re at the fire station!”

  DID YOU KNOW?

  In the late 1800s and early 1900s, industrialist Andrew Carnegie donated millions to build more than 2,500 libraries around the world, 29 of which were built in his native Scotland. The one in Kirkwall, built in 1909, is the northernmost Carnegie Library in the world. (The books are now housed elsewhere, but the building remains.)

  INTO THE NIGHT

  Much of the game is spent with the teams in one giant pack, a thick column of steam rising from the spot with the ba’. Inside the scrum, a lot is going on—kicking, elbowing, shoving, even punching. Orkadians say a lot of old scores get settled during the Ba’, as ribs are broken and eyes blackened. Team strategies include “smuggling” the ba’ under a jersey from one player to another, and “the dummy run,” which is one player breaking from the pack surrounded by a team of defenders. For a while, nobody knows who has the ba’, so the mob gets divided, with one part heading in the wrong direction, following the fake-out. Hand signals and vocal cues are used to communicate with teammates. It’s not uncommon for the game to last five hours or longer. At this time of year in the Orkneys, the sun sets before 4:00 p.m., so the players battle much of the game in darkness.

  THE BA’ MUST GO ON

  The Ba’ can take place in a blizzard or torrential rain—but it is never canceled. On Christmas Day 2017, play was stopped for 20 minutes while medics resuscitated a Doonie who had almost been crushed to death by a pile-on of players. Because the game can last for hours, it is part of the ritual for spectators to duck under a railing and into a pub for a “wee dram” of whisky and a warm-up before going back out to watch the game. Radio coverage provides blow-by-blow reports of the ba’ so nothing is missed. Some Orkadians aren’t fond of the ba’ because it can be violent—many players emerge with black eyes or broken arms, ribs, and noses. Others, mostly wives, complain that their husbands are gone on both winter holidays, spending more of their time in the pubs and at the Ba’ than with family.

  The Starbucks at the CIA’s headquarters in Washington, DC, is like a normal Starbucks, except that…

  AND THE WINNER IS

  As the game comes to its conclusion—the Uppies reach the wall, or the Doonies plunge the ball into the freezing cold waters of Kirkwall Bay—one more scrimmage occurs, usually between two or three players on the winning team. Why? Because the Ba’ has two winners—the team and a single star player. This individual must be more than just the MVP of the current game: he must also have demonstrated his skill and dedication over a lifetime of playing. This honor has Olympic gold medal status on the island and gives even distant family members and in-laws bragging rights about his winning the Ba’. The finalists for this honor are pretty clear, but the single winner isn’t decided until those last 15 or 20 minutes, when the players negotiate to determine who deserves the crown. Finally, one player is lifted up by the others, holding the ba’ triumphantly over his head, and the winner is declared.

  PARTY ON!

  After the team has enjoyed a celebratory drink, it’s traditional for the winner to invite all the players from both sides to his house for food and drink. If a Doonie has won, this signifies good fishing for the next year. If an Uppie wins—abundant harvests lie ahead. The celebration can go on for a week,
with the prized leather trophy never leaving the winner’s side.

  AUTHOR: ANONYMOUS

  When the novel Sense and Sensibility was first published in England in 1811, the author, a woman, was identified only as “A Lady.” The practice of publishing anonymously was common for female authors at the time. Seeking a career as a writer was socially taboo—women were expected to obtain fulfillment only in their roles as wives and mothers. Remaining anonymous was a way of demonstrating that literary pursuits did not interfere with their more important duties. When Sense and Sensibility found success, the author published five more novels; in each she was identified only as “the Author of Sense and Sensibility.” It wasn’t until after her death in 1817 at the age of 41 that she was finally identified by her name: Jane Austen.

  …the baristas aren’t allowed to write customers’ names on cups… and they can’t tell anyone where they work.

  THE MATILDA EFFECT

  Quick: Name five famous woman scientists. Let’s see—there’s Marie Curie, Jane Goodall, Rachel Carson, and…uhh…There’s a reason it’s tough to think of more names, and it’s called the “Matilda effect.”

  BACKGROUND

  The Matilda effect comes from the world of science, but it applies to the arts, business, and politics as well. It refers to a systemic bias against women, whose contributions are often credited to men. A recent National Geographic article described it like this: “Over the centuries, female researchers have had to work as ‘volunteer’ faculty members, seen credit for significant discoveries they’ve made assigned to male colleagues, and been written out of textbooks.”

  The term was coined in 1993 by science historian Margaret W. Rossiter, who was inspired by Matilda Joslyn Gage—a suffragist and political activist who worked alongside Susan B. Anthony to gain the right to vote for women. But she also strongly advocated for women to receive proper credit for their advances in science. Here’s an excerpt from Gage’s 1883 essay “Woman as Inventor”:

  No assertion in reference to woman is more common than that she possesses no inventive or mechanical genius…But, while such statements are carelessly or ignorantly made, tradition, history, and experience alike prove her possession of these faculties in the highest degree. Although woman’s scientific education has been grossly neglected, yet some of the most important inventions of the world are due to her.

  On the next few pages you’ll find the stories of just a few of the countless pioneering women who were met head-on by the Matilda effect.

  TROTA of SALERNO (mid-1100s)

  Accomplishments: The “Renaissance of the 12th Century” was a period of enlightenment in southern Italy. Women were actually allowed to be educated and have careers. One such woman was Trota di Ruggiero, a doctor and teacher at medieval Europe’s first true medical school. Far ahead of her time, she was responsible for several crucial advances, including:

  •First doctor known to call for a separate field of medicine dedicated to women’s reproductive health, and the first to suggest that women would be better at treating women.

  •Among the first doctors to recommend a balanced diet and regular exercise for better health.

  •Argued that pain during childbirth should be limited—a notion that went directly against the contemporary Christian belief that women should suffer during childbirth. And she administered opiates during childbirth to dull the pain.

  •Among the first doctors to turn a fetus into the proper position while still in utero.

  •Developed revolutionary Cesarean surgical techniques that led to lower postpartum death rates from infection.

  Mistletoe gets its name from the Old English mistil tan, “dung twig,” because people thought it grew in places where bird droppings landed in trees.

  Trota’s legacy lives on thanks to her three seminal books: Book on the Conditions of Women, On Treatments for Women, and On Women’s Cosmetics (which offered “treatments for frizzy hair, freckle removal, bad breath, and chapped lips”). Collectively, the books became known as a single work called The Trotula, which remained the definitive text on women’s health for the next 400 years.

  Matilda Effect: In the years following Trota’s death, Italy’s first renaissance came to an end, and women were once again denied educations. As such, later scholars falsely assumed that Trota had been a man—or even several men—all writing under the same pseudonym. (Some of the men given authorship weren’t even doctors.) Eventually, it became scandalous to even suggest that The Trotula, a book dedicated to women’s health, could have been written by anyone other than a man. It would take until the 16th century for that notion to finally be proven wrong. Today, Trota of Salerno is recognized as the world’s first modern gynecologist.

  CECILIA PAYNE (1900–79)

  Accomplishment: Today, it’s common knowledge that the Sun is made mostly of hydrogen and helium. But as recently as the 1920s, it was a widely accepted “fact” that the Sun was made of the same materials as Earth, and to suggest otherwise was scientific heresy. Cecilia Payne suggested otherwise. The British-born astronomer made the groundbreaking discovery about the true composition of stars in 1925 while working on her Ph.D. at Radcliffe College (now part of Harvard). When she presented her thesis to her professor, Henry Norris Russell, he told her it was the best thesis he’d ever read. (And it holds up today: Neil deGrasse Tyson called Payne’s “Stellar Atmospheres” the “most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.”)

  Matilda Effect: Even so, Russell urged Payne not to publish her “clearly impossible” conclusion because it went against scientific consensus. So Payne reluctantly shelved her work. Four years later, Russell reached the same conclusion in his own research and published the results himself. Although he did acknowledge Payne’s contributions within the paper, he put his own name on the cover, and she had to stand idly by as a man was given sole credit for her discovery. Payne finally set the record straight in her book The Stars of High Luminosity. In 1956 she became Harvard’s first female astronomy professor and the first woman to become department chair.

  “The giants—Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein—each in his turn, brought a new view of the universe. Payne’s discovery of the cosmic abundance of the elements did no less.”

  —The American Physical Society

  Air conditioners were first installed in Disneyland in 1963, eight years after the park opened. Reason: The animatronic figures were overheating.

  ANNA ARNOLD HEDGEMAN (1899–1990)

  Accomplishments: In her six decades as a civil rights activist, Hedgeman served as executive director of the YWCA, executive director of the Fair Employment Practices Commission, and Assistant Dean of Women at Howard University. She also served as director of Harry Truman’s 1948 presidential campaign, and became the first African American woman to serve in the cabinet of a New York City mayor. But perhaps her greatest achievement came in 1963 when she helped organize Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. Without Hedgeman’s involvement, the march might not have ever happened.

  That year, there were two civil rights marches planned on Washington, DC, one to be led by King in July, and the other by labor leader A. Philip Randolph in October. Concerned that the two marches might cancel each other out, it was Hedgeman who came up with the idea of combining the two into one. She arranged for the two civil rights leaders to meet and then helped them hammer out the details. Not only that, Hedgeman singlehandedly recruited more than 40,000 Protestants to attend, arranged transportation for more than 100,000 people, and made sure that everyone there got fed. Thanks in large part to her, the event was a huge success.

  Matilda Effect: The core team that organized the March on Washington became known as “the Big Six,” consisting of Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, John Lewis, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young. Notice someone missing? Anna Hedgeman. She was, as she later described it, “kept out of sight.” You read that
right: the men who fought for civil rights denied a woman a place at the table.

  But what really got Hedgeman angry was the announcement—a week before the march—that no women would be allowed to deliver speeches. “Instead,” wrote Hedgeman, “it was proposed that Mr. Randolph, as chairman, would ask several Negro women to stand while he reviewed the historic role of Negro women, and that the women would merely take a bow at the end of his presentation.” Hedgeman drafted a passionate letter urging them to reconsider, which she read aloud at a meeting:

  In light of the role of the Negro women in the struggle for freedom and especially in light of the extra burden they have carried because of the castration of the Negro man in this culture, it is incredible that no woman should appear as a speaker at the historic March on Washington Meeting at the Lincoln Memorial.

  Per her request, Elizabeth Taylor’s funeral began 15 minutes later than scheduled. (She wanted to be late to her own funeral.)

  Because of Hedgeman’s vigilance, one woman did get to stand at the podium and give “brief remarks”—Daisy Bates, a publisher and civic leader who had helped the “Little Rock Nine” black students attend an all-white school in Arkansas in 1957. The remarks weren’t much, but it was another small step forward. Three years later, Hedgeman and 48 other women cofounded the National Organization for Women.

  MARGARET KNIGHT (1838–1914)

  Accomplishments: We take it for granted that paper grocery bags have flat bottoms. Before that advancement, paper bags were pretty much useless: they didn’t stand up, and were so poorly made that they often broke. Margaret Knight changed all that. She’d been a successful inventor since her teens, when she invented an automatic shutoff for malfunctioning factory machines. Because women weren’t supposed to apply for patents, Knight didn’t, and she never made a dime from the invention, even as her design was being used in factories around the world and would go on to save countless lives.