Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Zipper Accidents (9 page)

I
t’s never fun to give your boss bad news. And it’s worse when the bad news is your own fault. Just ask Miles Byrne, who was caddy for golfer Ian Woosnam during the 2001 British Open. After three days of play, Woosnam was tied for the lead. On the final day, his first tee shot was just inches from being a hole-in-one. Standing on the second tee, Woosnam knew the biggest win of his career was in reach. Then Byrne gave him the news.

“There’s too may clubs in the bag.”

PGA rules are strict and clear: A golfer is allowed to have only 14 clubs, and Woosnam had an extra driver. The error cost Woosnam two strokes, raising his score on the first hole from a two to a four. Woosnam, an ex-boxer, yelled at Byrne, reportedly saying, “I gave you one job to do, and this is what happens,” but then composed himself and finished the tournament tied for third place, winning around $300,000. Without the two-stroke penalty, he would have won $320,000 more and the title. Right after learning of the penalty, Woosnam threw the club, probably the most expensive in history, into the woods. Woosnam fired Byrne two weeks later.

S
tatistics are unavailable for just how many people took part, but “skinvertising” was a widely reported element of dot-com boom in the 2000s. What was it? In those days of brash marketing and wild campaigns for name recognition by new web companies, startups would pay people anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000 to tattoo the company’s name on their bodies. It was stunt marketing, the provenance of aggressive new companies at the frontier of the new web economy. And what happened to so many of those web companies? Many of them went out of business. But many of the tattoos live on.

      
•
  
In 2003 Jim Nelson got a tattoo on the back of his head for CI Host.

      
•
  
Mark Greenlaw still has a tattoo on his neck advertising web hosting company Glob@t (which is still around).

      
•
  
Joe Tamargo is a walking billboard for 15 web companies, most of them now defunct, including
PillDaddy.com
(a Viagra marketer) and
SaveMartha.com
(a site aiming to get Martha Stewart out of prison, during her brief residency in the slammer).

      
•
  
Karolyne Smith still has an ad on her forehead for
GoldenPalace.com
, an online casino. The
site is still around, but most online gambling was outlawed in the U.S. in 2011, meaning the mother of four carries a facial ad for an illegal service.

      
•
  
A man named Billy Gibby sold the rights to rename him to web hosting company Hostgator—his legal name is still Hostgator Dotcom. He has 37 tattoos, many on this face. He sold flesh ad space to
GoldenPalace.com
to pay for medical bills incurred after he gave his kidney to a friend in need.

T
he Usual Suspects
(1995)
is about five criminals who commit a robbery together after meeting at a police lineup. Near the beginning of the movie, in the lineup scene, each is supposed to step forward and repeat a line allegedly heard by a witness at a crime scene. For some reason, all five (played by Kevin Pollak, Stephen Baldwin, Gabriel Byrne, Kevin Spacey, and Benicio Del Toro) laugh to varying degrees as they say the line. The script called for the scene to be serious, so why the laughter? Del Toro was repeatedly farting during the scene, and his silent but powerfully stinky gassy bouts were making his co-stars crack up.

In
Zoolander
(2001),
former hand model and conspiracy theorist J.P. Prewitt (David Duchovny) explains to incredibly dumb male model Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller) that all major historical assassinations have been planned by the fashion industry. Derek then asks, “But why male models?” and Prewitt explains in a lengthy monologue.
Then Derek responds, “Why male models?” again. He’d forgotten his original line and just repeated the other one instead. Stiller, the film’s writer and director, kept the mistake in because it added to the characterization of Derek Zoolander as incredibly stupid.

A scene in
Being John Malkovich
(1999)
has John Malkovich (played by John Malkovich, of course) angrily walking down the road. As scripted, a car full of extras was supposed to drive by. Instead, one of those extras leans out the window and shouts, “Hey Malkovich! Think fast!” and throws a can at Malkovich and hits him in the head. The actor gets noticeably mad. Director Spike Jonze thought it fit the scene—angry Malkovich—perfectly. The extra even got bonus pay.

One of the biggest themes of Woody Allen’s
Annie Hall
(1977)
is that his character, Alvy Singer, is a neurotic nerd, hopelessly outclassed by the cool, cosmopolitan Annie (Diane Keaton). In one scene, the couple go to a party and are handed a small container filled with cocaine. As Alvy takes the tin, he lets out an enormous sneeze, sending white powder everywhere. All the actors burst out laughing. As it made Alvy look about as nerdy as possible, Allen kept the sight gag in the movie.

M
erle Watson was a folk singer and the son of folk-singing legend Doc Watson. Late one night in 1985, the younger Watson, 36, couldn’t sleep, so he went to the basement of his Lenoir, North Carolina, farmhouse and started cutting some wood. But his saw got caught up in a knot, and a huge splinter shot up and pierced the muscle of his left arm.

No one else was there, and Watson couldn’t remove the splinter. And he was bleeding. So he went outside and jumped on his tractor, hoping that one of his neighbors would still be awake. He saw a house on top of a nearby hill with the lights on, so he raced the tractor up there as fast as he could before he passed out. The nice couple brought Watson inside and removed the splinter. Then they bandaged up his arm.

He thanked them and set off for home. But he was tired and had lost a lot of blood. While trying to steer the tractor down the couple’s steep driveway, Watson hit the brakes and they locked up. The tractor skidded over an embankment, flipped over, and landed on top of Watson, crushing and killing him.

T
he NFL’s Dallas Cowboys are one of the most famous sports franchises in the world and, according to
Forbes
, the most valuable team in the NFL, worth $2.1 billion. The team’s online home:
dallascowboys.com
. But in 2007, the even more streamlined “
cowboys.com
,” purchased and locked down years before and left unused by a “squatter,” became available. Website names of common words, such as “cowboys,” do not come cheap, and yet it didn’t seem odd to Dallas Cowboys management when they secured the rights to
cowboys.com
from a domain name agency for a measly $275.

They actually hadn’t secured it at all. Because the price was actually $275,000, not $275. A front-office representative thought that the “275” mentioned in a phone conversation with the domain seller meant “275,” while the seller meant “275,000.” When the NFL team elected not to pay the very high fee (which it could easily afford),
cowboys.com
went up for sale at auction, where the Dallas Cowboys acquired it…for $375,000.

The Cowboys’ communications team set up
cowboys.com
to redirect traffic to DallasCowboys. com, since that address was well established. But website owners must occasionally renew their domain name registrations.
Cowboys.com
was up for renewal in 2012, and the Dallas Cowboys let it expire. Result:
cowboys.com
became available for purchase again. Millionaire Match, which runs an array of dating and matchmaking websites, purchased
cowboys.com
…which is now a cowboy-themed gay dating website.