Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader (30 page)

• Some treatment plants pump the water through a
trickling filter
, where the water flows over a bed of porous material that's coated with a slimy film of microorganisms. The microorganisms break the organic matter down into carbon dioxide and water.

• Another process utilizes
activated sludge
—living sludge that is made up millions upon millions of bacteria cells. The wastewater is pumped into a tank containing the sludge, and the bacteria absorb any remaining organic matter.

• Finally, the wastewater is processed in something called a
secondary clarifier
, which removes the bacteria before they are discharged back into the environment.

• Some water treatment facilities don't use trickling filters or activated sludge, they just pump the water into a lagoon or a
stabilization pond
, where the water is allowed to sit while naturally occurring bacteria and other microorganisms do the same job on their own, only a little slower.

Most wastewater that has received both primary and secondary treatment is considered safe enough to go back into the environment. But some water does require further treatment, especially if it is going to be reused by humans.

• Processes with such names as
reverse osmosis
and
electrodialysis
can remove “dissolved” solids—solids that can pass easily through other kinds of filters. Then the water is filtered and treated chemically to remove phosphorous, ammonia, nitrogen, and phosphates.

• If the water is going to be made safe for drinking, it is also treated with chlorine or disinfected by ozone.

That's it! The water is clean. (Uncle John wouldn't want to drink it, but that doesn't mean it isn't clean.)

Not everyone is hooked up to a water treatment facility. If you live out in the country, you may be hooked up to a septic tank, which performs the same wastewater treatment functions, only more simply and naturally:

• The water from your toilets, bathtubs, showers, and sinks feed into a simple tank, usually made of concrete, cinder blocks, or metal.

• Solid matter settles to the bottom and the liquid remains on top.

• The liquid overflows into a system of underground trenches, often filled with rocks or gravel, where it can safely dissipate into the surrounding soil and biodegrade naturally.

• The solids settle at the bottom of the tank and break down organically. You can help the process along by adding special yeast and other treatments to the septic tank; if this isn't enough, it may have to be pumped out.

“Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat.”

—John Lehman, US secretary of the Navy

BRI stalwart David Zapp collected these puzzles…and dared us to solve them. Naturally, Uncle John immediately took them to our “research lab” and pronounced them bona fide bathroom reading. Now, we “pass” them on to you. (Answers are on page 516.)

1.
A murderer is condemned to death. He has to choose between three rooms. The first is full of raging fires, the second is full of assassins with loaded guns, and the third is full of lions that haven't eaten in three years.

Which room is safest?

2.
Can you name three consecutive days without using the words Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday?

3.
A man is found dead in the Arctic with a pack on his back.

What happened?

4.
A man pushes a car up to a hotel and tells the owner he's bankrupt.

What's going on?

5.
You have two plastic jugs filled with water. How can you put all the water into a barrel, without using the jugs or any dividers, and still tell which water came from which jug?

6.
This is an unusual paragraph. I'm curious how quickly you can find out what is so unusual about it? It looks so plain you would think nothing was wrong with it. In fact, nothing is wrong with it. It is unusual, though. Study it, think about it…but you still may not find anything odd.

7.
A carrot, two lumps of coal, and a pipe lie together in the middle of a field.

What happened?

8.
A woman shoots her husband. Then she holds him under water for over five minutes. Finally, she hangs him. But five minutes later, they both go out and enjoy a wonderful dinner together.

How can this be?

9.
What's black when you buy it, red when you use it, and gray when you throw it away?

10.
A man is born in 1972 and dies in 1952 at age 25.

What's the deal?

Free advice from Uncle John: When you're caught red-handed, it's better just to fess up and take your lumps. Here are a few people who would have done well to follow his advice.

In August 1996 in Tampa, Florida, police arrested Robert Meier and charged him with credit fraud for marrying his comatose girlfriend only hours before she died…so he could rack up more than $20,000 in charges on her credit cards. Meier's excuse: It was his girlfriend's dog's fault. According to a police spokesperson, “He said the dog told him she would want him to have a better life, so it would be OK to use her credit cards.”

In February 1997, Cathleen Byers, former manager of the Oregon Urban Rural Credit Union, was arrested for embezzlement. Was she guilty? Byers admitted stealing $630,000 over six years but claimed that she wasn't
really
guilty because she suffers from multiple personality disorder. One of her other personalities—Ava, Joy, Elizabeth, Tillie, Claudia, C. J., Katy, Roman, Cookie, Mariah, Frogger, Chrissy, or Colleen—must have done it without her knowledge. An expert testified that whichever alter-personality took the money didn't know right from wrong and that Byers wasn't even aware of what her alter-self was up to. The judge didn't buy it, arguing that Byers “should have been clued in by the new house and the luxury cars.”

After only one month on the job, Calgary, Alberta, school bus driver Marvin Franks was arrested for driving his bus while under the influence of alcohol. Police pulled Franks's bus over and administered a breath test after a terrified student called 911 using her cell phone. The bus driver was found to have a blood-alcohol level three times the legal limit. In an interview with the
Calgary Sun,
Franks admitted to having two beers before starting his route, on top of being hungover from drinking the night before. But he blamed his drinking on job stress, which he
blamed on the kids he drives to school. “If you had these kids on your bus, you'd drink too,” he explained.

In March 2002, 47-year-old Susan Wallace, a former British Airways flight attendant, was convicted of animal cruelty after she threw Igwig, her three-foot-long iguana, at a doorman and then later at a policeman following an altercation in a pub. Wallace maintains that she is innocent because Igwig acted of his own volition. “He probably jumped in defense of me. He's done that before,” she said. (Igwig is now banned from the pub.)

In May 2001, David Duyst of Grand Rapids, Michigan, was convicted of murdering his wife and was then sentenced to life without parole. Yet to this day, Duyst insists that he's not guilty, despite a mountain of forensic evidence against him. So how'd she die? According to Duyst, she committed suicide by shooting herself…
twice,
in the
back
of her head.

In October 2001, professional boxer Waxxem Fikes, 35, served five days in an Akron, Ohio, jail after assaulting a waiter at Swenson's restaurant. According to testimony, Fikes was “aggressively complaining” that the onions on his double cheeseburger were unsatisfactory. “I told him that I expect the onions to be crisp, tender and succulent, and bursting with flavor,” Fikes testified. “They were not. My hands are lethal weapons or whatever, I know that. But he had no compassion for what I was talking about.”

In March 2001, a woman in Munich, Germany, saw a neighbor carrying a dead body into his apartment. She called the police. When the suspect answered the door in a “surprised and disturbed state,” officers thought for sure that they had a murderer on their hands. Not quite. As the embarrassed man explained, the “dead body” was actually a life-sized silicon doll that he'd just bought at an adult bookstore.

A cosmic question: when is underwear newsworthy? The answer: it's newsworthy when it's…

In March 2002, Reuters reported that maternity wards in Sweden were using underpants as caps for newborns. Why? Because when they use real baby caps, people steal them. “We got tired of buying new caps all the time,” said one nurse; so they started using adult hospital-issue underwear instead. She said if you roll up the underpants nicely on the baby's tiny head, it doesn't look that bad.

In April 2001, San Francisco conceptual artist Nicolino unveiled his latest sculpture: a 1,000-pound “Bra Ball” made up of bras donated by 20,000 women, including supermodel Naomi Campbell. That wasn't Nicolino's first brassiere-inspired work. He once tried to fly a 40,000-bra tapestry over the White House using 10 breast-shaped helium balloons to support it.

Officials in Linn County, Oregon, have banned underwear for jail inmates, saying it's too expensive to wash and replace. It's also dangerous: an inmate recently tried to hang himself with the elastic on his briefs, said a sheriff. When a prisoner protested the new policy, claiming that it's his “constitutional right” to wear underpants, Sheriff Dave Burright noted, “I don't remember Thomas Jefferson putting anything about underwear in the Constitution.”

Every July, people from all over the world travel to Berlin, Germany, to celebrate “freedom and sensuality” at the city's annual “Love Parade.” In 2002 city officials came up with an odd promotion for the event: they decided to sell pairs of thong underwear as tickets to the subway. Available in black or white, the unisex
garments cost 12 euros (about $8) and were good for travel all day. To get on the train, all riders had to do was show their thongs. Ticket inpsectors said that people wouldn't have to remove the underwear to get on the train…but they would need to be “flashed.”

Customs officers in the Czech Republic stopped a car at the border and promptly arrested the driver for smuggling. To avoid paying import duties, the man had hidden contraband inside every door and seat of the car and even behind the dashboard. The contraband: 1,400 pairs of ladies' panties.

In 1999 Russian scientists reported that they were working to solve a problem as old as the space program: what to do with the dirty underwear? Storage space is precious on the ever-longer trips, and engineers have increasing difficulty finding room for used undies. Cosmonauts complain when they're ordered to wear their underwear too long, so the scientists came up with a solution: develop a bacteria that can eat underwear. They hope to have it perfected by 2017. Bonus: The bacteria will also release methane gas, which could then be used as fuel.