Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader (52 page)

ROCK AND ROLE

Some Hawaiians are questioning the decision to cast wrestler/actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in the lead role for a new movie about Hawaiian king Kamehameha I. What’s wrong with that? It turns out The Rock is part Samoan, and historically, Samoans are fierce enemies of the Hawaiians.

LADIES’ MAN

Johnny Hamilton gives $400,000 a year to women’s shelters, scholarships, and feminist charities in Michigan. He is the owner of a topless bar in Detroit.

LOVE AND MARRIAGE

• A 21-year-old man from Rockville, Maryland, was arrested for peeping into a ladies’ restroom stall while he was at the county courthouse. He was there to pick up his new marriage license.

• Anne Jonsson of Stockholm, Sweden, viciously attacked her husband, Lars. She fractured his skull, broke his nose, and gave him various cuts and bruises. What did Lars do to deserve all this? He refused to take her to a rally against domestic violence.

FALSE ADVERTISING

After falling short of its projected profits,
Success
magazine declared bankruptcy in 1999.

*        *        *

“My mother never saw the irony of calling me a son-of-a-bitch.”

—Richard Jeni

Prior to 1953, the slogan of L&M cigarettes was “just what the doctor ordered.”

SORRY (
NOT REALLY
)

Uncle John once called the BRI researcher who worked on this article “a big dummy.” He now regrets making that remark. Here are some other insincere apologies the big dummy dug up for us
.

B
USH LEAGUE

Who Said It:
Presidential candidate George W. Bush

Slip of the Lip:
Just before a speech in Illinois during the 2000 campaign, then-Governor Bush leaned over to his running mate, Dick Cheney. “There’s Adam Clymer,” he said, “major league a**hole from
The New York Times
.” Cheney responded, “Big time.” Problem: They were speaking near a live microphone. Members of the press heard the slur, and soon most of the world did, too.

Insincere Apology:
When questioned about it, Cheney refused to comment. Asked later that day whether he would be apologizing, Governor Bush said, “I regret people heard the comments.”

YOU CAN RUN BUT YOU CAN’T HYDE

Who Said It:
Alec Baldwin

Slip of the Lip:
In 1998 on NBC’s
Late Night with Conan O’Brien
, Baldwin was asked about the ongoing impeachment trial of President Clinton. Speaking about one of the leaders of the impeachment movement, Rep. Henry Hyde, Baldwin went on a rant. “If we were in another country we would stone Henry Hyde to death! We would stone him to death!” He added that, “We would stone Henry Hyde to death and we would go to their homes and we’d kill their wives and their children. We would kill their families.”

Insincere Apology:
Baldwin’s publicist denied it was anything more than a big joke. The tirade was just “a parody on the hysteria in this country coming from right-wing fanatics.”

SETTING AN EXAMPLE

Who Said It:
Reverend Jerry Falwell

Slip of the Lip:
On CBS’s
60 Minutes
in October 2002, he said, “I think Muhammad was a terrorist,” adding, “Jesus set the example for love, as did Moses. Muhammad set an opposite example.” Outraged religious leaders around the world demanded an apology.

Emily Warner of Frontier Airlines was the first woman to pilot a commercial jet in 1973.

Insincere Apology:
“I sincerely apologize that certain statements of mine were hurtful to the feelings of many Muslims,” he said. “I intended no disrespect to any sincere, law-abiding Muslim.”

THE DOCTOR IS OUT

Who Said It:
Talk show host “Dr. Laura” Schlessinger

Slip of the Lip:
She called homosexuals “deviants” and “biological errors” numerous times on her radio show.

Insincere Apology:
On March 10, 2000, Schlessinger took out a full-page ad in
Variety
. “Regrettably,” it read, “some of the words I’ve used have hurt some people, and I am sorry for that.” Critics questioned the timing of the statement: a
Dr. Laura
TV show was in the works, and the producer, Paramount Pictures, was getting bombarded by e-mails, phone calls, and advertiser boycott threats.

Insincere Apology Retracted:
Days later, in the
Boston Herald
, Schlessinger took it back, saying it was “not an apology,” it was a “clarification.” (Her TV show bombed.)

MARKETING MAGIQ

Who Said It:
Los Angeles Lakers basketball star Shaquille O’Neal

Slip of the Lip:
Asked in June 2002 about Yao Ming, the NBA’s first Chinese player, Shaq replied with a mock-Chinese accent, “Tell Yao Ming ‘Ching-chong-yang-wah-ah-so.’” He thought it was so funny, he repeated it in December. When columnist Irwin Tang wrote about it for
AsianWeek.com
, Asian community groups began protesting and reporters peppered O’Neal with questions.

Insincere Apology #1: “
To say I’m a racist against Asians is crazy. I said a joke. It was a 70-30 joke. 70% of the people thought it was funny. 30% didn’t. If I hurt anybody’s feelings, I apologize.”

Insincere Apology #2:
Protesters refused to let the issue die. A few days later, O’Neal said, “If I was the first one to do it, and the only one to do it, I could see what they’re talking about. But if I offended anybody, I apologize.” Asian Americans were still angry.

Insincere Apology #3:
Protests grew. After a game against Yao’s Houston Rockets in January, O’Neal tried again: “Yao Ming is my brother. The Asian people are my brothers. It was unfortunate that one idiot writer tried to start a racial war over that.” He added, “But because of what I said, 500 million people saw this game. You ought to thank me for my marketing skills.”

The original Macy’s made a total of $11.06 on its first day of business in 1858.

DUMB CROOKS

More proof that crime doesn’t pay
.

W
HERE THERE’S SMOKE…

“A southern California firefighter, who was paid for each fire that he fought, was arrested for starting forest fires after his fellow firemen noticed that he always started warming up the fire engine just before the fires were called in.”

—“The Edge,” Portland
Oregonian

THERE’S A CRACK IN HIS ALIBI

“Fred Benevento, 47, a math teacher at Fairfax (Virginia) High School, was arrested during a stakeout conducted by D.C. police, who said they found 13 plastic bags of crack cocaine in his car.

“Benevento, who has been suspended pending the outcome of the trial, pled not guilty to the charge. His defense? He told police that the bags of cocaine found in his car ‘came flying through his open window’ and that he ‘was just looking at them when the police officers arrived.’”

—Washington Post

IS THIS THE COMPLAINT DEPARTMENT?

“In South Carolina, a man walked into a local police station, dropped a bag of cocaine on the counter, informed the desk sergeant that it was substandard cut, and asked that the person who sold it to him be arrested immediately.”

—Miami Herald

COMING CLEAN

“Police officers of the Russian city of Ulyanovsk arrested a 33-year-old who warned them of a bomb that was placed in the bath house (
banya
) on Pushkin Street. The police quickly determined that the telephone terrorist called from the pay phone across the street from the bath house. When questioned, the man confessed his motive: He wanted to see naked people running out of the banya. (It should be mentioned here that it was “Women’s Day” at the banya.)”

—Reuters

Tailor talk: A bolt of cloth is 120 feet long.

CURE FOR WHAT AILS YE

Uncle John believes that placing this page against your forehead and rubbing vigorously will cure headaches, fever blisters, tennis elbow, planter’s warts, swimmer’s ear, lazy eye, pinkeye, the evil eye, weak knees, and tired blood. Here are some of Uncle John’s other favorite folk remedies:

To cure lung infections, rub onions on your chest.

To ease arthritis pain, carry a peeled potato in your pocket. If that doesn’t work, try a pocketful of buckshot…or the ashes from a turtle shell.

For kidney troubles, eat… kidney beans. If that doesn’t work, try chewing the bones from a dogfish head.

To cure a cold, rub your feet with grease. If that doesn’t work, eat some bear brains.

Fox fat, when warmed and placed in the ear, will cure an earache.

To get rid of a wart, rub the wart with a peeled apple, then feed the apple to a pig.

To treat a burn, rub it with mashed potatoes.

To cure a child of whooping cough, put them on a donkey and lead the donkey in a clockwise circle nine times.

Eating beaver fat will calm your nerves.

Rubbing a fox tongue on your eyes will cure cataracts.

To cure a headache, tie a string around a buzzard’s head and wear it around your neck.

Frostbite? Mix cow milk with cow manure and apply it to the affected area.

To fix a limp, rub the bad leg with skunk or wildcat grease.

To stop a nosebleed, pack your nose with cobwebs.

To reduce fever, eat watermelon or chew turnips.

To cure swollen eyes, put crab eyes on the back of your neck.

A piece of deer hoof worn in a ring will cure epilepsy.

If you touch a sleeping person with a frog tongue, they will reveal their secrets to you.

Them’s the breaks: No insurance company will underwrite Jackie Chan’s productions.

AMERICA’S FIRST REALITY TV SHOW

Survivor
and
The Real World
may seem innovative, but they owe a huge debt to a show that hasn’t aired since 1973, despite being named one of the greatest shows of all time by
TV Guide.
Here’s the story of the show that started it all
.

G
ET REAL

In 1971 a documentary film producer named Craig Gilbert came up with a novel idea for an educational TV show: film the lives of four American families in four different parts of the country—the West Coast, the Midwest, the South, and the East Coast. A different film crew would be assigned to each family and would film their lives for four straight weeks, from the moment the first person got up until the last person went to bed. Many hours of footage would be filmed, then it would be edited and condensed into four one-hour documentaries, one on each family. The documentaries would be broadcast on PBS.

Television programming was a lot different in those days—for years viewers had been fed a steady diet of decidedly
un
realistic family shows like
Ozzie and Harriet
,
Father Knows Best, The Waltons
, and
The Brady Bunch
. Gilbert figured viewers might be interested in a new aspect of American family life: reality.

FAMILY SECRETS

For the West Coast family, Gilbert chose the Louds, an upper middle-class family living in Santa Barbara, California—parents Bill and Pat, and their five teenage children: sons Lance, Kevin, and Grant, and daughters Delilah and Michele. “They basically said, ‘How would you like to star in the greatest home movie ever made?’” Lance Loud remembered. “We didn’t have to do anything, just be our little Southern California hick selves.”

Gilbert hired two filmmakers, Susan and Alan Raymond, to film the family. Shortly after production got underway, he decided to dump the four-family concept and focus exclusively on the Louds—for a longer time period. To this day it is unclear whether Craig Gilbert knew it at the time, but the Louds’ marriage was in serious trouble (thanks to Bill’s philandering), and their son Lance, who lived in New York, was gay. The Louds had assumed that keeping their family secrets for four weeks wouldn’t be that difficult; but now Gilbert was asking them for permission to film for months on end. Could they withstand this invasion of their privacy?

The mayfly’s eggs take 3 years to hatch. Lifespan: about 6 hours.

Bill and Pat thought it over…and decided to take a chance. “I thought I might get away with just saying, ‘These are my children and my kitchen and my pool and my horses, over and out.’” Pat Loud recalled years later. “What naifs we were!”

OPEN HOUSE

Bill and Pat need not have worried about protecting Lance Loud’s privacy—he was completely open about his sexuality, even when the film crew was present. He was the very first openly gay teenager ever shown on American television; for many viewers, he was the first out-of-the-closet homosexual they had ever seen.

As for the Louds’ marital problems, they proved both impossible to hide and impossible to repair. As the weeks passed and Pat became more comfortable around the cameras, she began to open up about the problems she was having with Bill. Their marriage continued to deteriorate until finally, a few months into filming, Pat threw Bill out of the house. The Raymonds were there, and they captured it all on film.

12-STEP PROGRAM

By the time the Raymonds wrapped up production, they’d been filming the Louds for seven solid months. They had so much raw footage—more than 300 hours worth—that it took them the better part of two years to edit it down to the 12 one-hour episodes that would air as
An American Family
beginning in January 1973.