Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd (3 page)

—
Mike McShane

Thieves…you just never know what they’re gonna steal next.

S
TICKY FINGERS

Someone stole the head off a life-size wax statue of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart from a museum in Salzburg, Austria, in 2005. “It must have happened between 8 p.m. Friday, when we closed, and today before 9 a.m.,” employee Elisabeth Stoeckl told reporters. “When we opened up again, Mozart’s head was gone,” she said, adding that the stolen head was worth about $18,000.

In 1999 a man in Los Angeles was arrested after leading police on a slow-speed chase…on a stolen steamroller. An officer stopped the runaway steamroller by climbing aboard and shutting it off. The man explained the theft by saying he was “tired of walking.”

Security cameras in a Wellington, New Zealand, library captured shots of three masked vandals as they walked up to a tiki—a wooden figurine made by the country’s indigenous people, the Maori—chopped off its wooden penis with chisels, and then ran away. The artist who had carved the tiki, Kerry Strongman, called the theft an insult to the mana, or “pride,” of the city, and immediately began work on a replacement penis for the statue.

In September 2006,
USA Today
reported that at least seven men had been electrocuted and killed since July trying to steal wire from live power lines. Three of the deaths were in Detroit, the latest being when the body of a 24-year-old man was found near a utility box. A pair of wire cutters was found next to his body. Authorities said the would-be thieves were motivated by record-high copper prices—the price of scrap copper has doubled in the last year, according to the report, to about $3 per pound.

The world would be a much less interesting place if it weren’t for artists. Especially these ones.

A
RTIST:
Federico D’Orazio

TITLE:
“Full Love Inn”

STORY:
In September 2006, D’Orazio removed the seats from an Opel Kadett, replaced them with a double-bed mattress, and had the car hoisted up onto 13-foot-tall poles in downtown Amsterdam. He then invited people to write to him to request an overnight stay in the airborne car. “I tried to make a space for real love in a city where sex is dominant,” he said. “You can have sex because it is a safe structure. It is shaking up very safely.” He received enough requests to keep the car booked for six months, but the love-mobile art-piece only stayed up until mid-October.

ARTIST:
Zhang Huan

TITLE:
“Seeds of Hamburg”

STORY:
In 2002 Chinese-born performance artist Zhang Huan constructed a wood-and-chicken-wire cage at a gallery in Hamburg, Germany. In the cage were some leafless tree branches and 28 live doves. Huan then entered the cage…naked…covered head to toe in honey and birdseed. The birds ate the seeds off of Huan’s body while he posed in various positions. The performance ended with Huan cradling one of the birds, which had just pulled a red ribbon from his mouth. The doves, the ribbon, and the birdseed, Huan said, symbolized “hope, freedom, and rebirth.”

ARTIST:
Kittiwat Unarom, Thailand

TITLE:
“Human Being Parts”

STORY:
Unarom, 28, has an unusual art studio near his home south of Bangkok. It’s an everyday working bakery, except that it sells bread products that look like human body parts—feet, hands, torsos, and heads. Unarom studied real corpses to get the look down perfectly. He told reporters that he hopes the human-bread-food, which he said was selling well, will leave people wondering whether they consume food—or food consumes them.

ARTIST:
Lisa Newman

TITLE:
“Kobe”

STORY:
In July 2006, Newman took off her clothes and got down on all fours inside a small plastic bin. She was then fed beer through a tube from a container held by one of her “handlers,” doused with the Japanese rice wine
sake
, and thoroughly massaged. Sounds like fun, but Newman and her collaborator, Llewyn Maire, part of the art duo
Gyrl Grip
, were hard at work on a performance-art piece. Performed at a gallery in Toronto (and videotaped), the show mimicked the preparation of prized Kobe beef cattle, who are, just as in the performance, fed beer, coated with sake, and massaged daily to produce their prizewinning taste and texture. The show, they said, “deals with the fetishization of food and Japanese culture.”

ARTIST:
James Robert Ford

TITLE:
“Bogey-ball”

STORY:
Ford is a respected British installation artist, and he’s got a giant ball of his own snot to prove it. He collected the mucus from his nose from 2004 to 2006 until his “Bogey-ball” was nearly the size of a golf ball. He showed it at four exhibitions and then announced he would be putting it up for sale. Price: $20,000. “It’s a physical record of all the different places I’ve been and people I’ve met,” he said. As for selling it, “It will be hard to let go,” he said, “but at the same time, it’s hard not to have any money.”

*       *       *

• Actor Lance Henriksen (
Millennium, Aliens
) has a daughter named Alchamy.

• Rachel Griffiths (
Six Feet Under
) named her son Banjo.

• Jason Lee (
My Name is Earl
) named his son Pilot Inspektor.

• Actress Shannyn Sossaman, who used to be a deejay, named her son Audio Science.

• Ving Rhames (
Pulp Fiction
) named his daughter Reignbeau.

Ah, merry old England. Tea time, Big Ben, and…protesting clowns?

T
HE CHECK’S IN THE MAIL

A £117,000 check intended for a 70-year-old Wimbledon woman was accidentally delivered to her neighbor, 19-year-old Andrew Curzon. But rather than hand the check over, Curzon wrote his own name on top of his neighbor’s and then tried to deposit it in his bank account. His excuse: Curzon, a law student, said he couldn’t help himself—he claimed he suffers from
dyspraxia
, a condition that, among other symptoms, doesn’t allow the brain to “engage in logical thinking.”

In 2006 police in Hastings discovered 638 marijuana plants growing in a warehouse rented by David Churchward. But Churchward had an excuse: He wasn’t growing them for himself…they were for his wife. He said marijuana—of which he had enough to make 280,000 cigarettes—was the only thing that could cure his wife’s insomnia. (Churchward was attending the plants—naked—when arrested.)

Adhering to strict aviation guidelines prohibiting passengers from bringing on board anything resembling a weapon, British Airways refused to allow runner Kate Horan to carry her pros thetic leg on board a flight to a world-championship track meet in Amsterdam. The $10,000 leg (in a duffel bag) was confiscated, then lost at London’s Heathrow airport. The leg’s manufacturer scrambled to make a new one in time for Horan’s event. They did…and Horan won a bronze medal. (The leg was found a week later.)

Vanda Jones, 49, of Wales has five kids. She kept forgetting their birthdays, so she had the dates tattooed on her arm. “Whenever I took my kids to the health clinic, I could never
remember their birthdays off the top of my head,” she said. “It’s much easier now because I just have to look at my arm and I don’t forget.”

In the United States, singer Chris de Burgh is best known for his 1986 hit song “Lady in Red.” When his singing career ended, DeBurgh took up a new one: faith healing. In 2006 a woman named Marisa Mackle told reporters that her arm, paralyzed for a decade, was made completely normal again after DeBurgh laid his palms on it. DeBurgh also claims to have a helped a 57-year-old man lose his slight limp. DeBurgh touched the bum leg and said the man was walking better “within 20 minutes.”

While driving in Hampshire in 2006, 77-year-old medical researcher Ronald Mann had a heart attack. As his heart stopped beating, he slipped into unconsciousness and slumped over the steering wheel, causing his Honda Civic to careen out of control and crash into a tree. During the impact, Mann’s chest hit the steering wheel so hard that it restarted his heart. “Perversely,” Mann later said, “the crash saved my life.”

Officials at England’s Norwich Prison were fed up with prisoners’ profane language, so they hired college Shakespeare professor Jane Wirgman to teach them better English. Thanks to Wirgman, prisoners at Norwich now insult each other with lines from Shakespeare plays, calling each things like “thou odiferous stench” and “thou crusty botch of nature.”

In 1992, a London circus hired American clown Denise “Baby D” Payne to headline its Christmas show. Homegrown clowns were outraged. “We are funny,” said British clown “Mr. Jam.” “American clowns are all shout and glitter.” Mr. Jam and dozens of other clowns protested at Heathrow Airport upon Baby D’s arrival. How do clowns protest? They threw pies and tickled police officers.

C
hindogu \chin-doh-goo\
n 1) an almost useless object; 2) an invention that actually exists, but that consumers would be too embarrassed to use; 3) an object that is not for sale, and that nobody would buy anyway.

B
ACKGROUND

Since the 1990s, writer Kenji Kawakami has been collecting unusual inventions that he calls
chindogu
(Japanese for “weird tool”). These objects offer clever (and strange) solutions to everyday problems. But what makes them unusual isn’t their brilliance or simplicity. In fact, chindogu inventions are complicated, inconvenient, wildly impractical, embarrassing when used in public and, ultimately, completely useless.

Through Kawakami’s four books, chindogu has developed into a humorous art form, with more and more fans worldwide inventing odd contraptions. There’s even an International Chindogu Society. The “rules of chindogu”: The invention cannot be patented (“If the idea’s worth stealing, it’s not chindogu”), it cannot be for sale, it must actually exist, and it must “challenge the suffocating dominance of utility.” To join the Society, a prospective member has to invent a new chindogu. But watch out—many truly useless ones have already been invented. Here are some classics:

COMMUTER’S HELMET.
This red hard hat straps to the user’s head, then sticks to the wall of the train with a small toilet plunger, preventing the user from toppling over if he falls asleep. A handy card attached to the forehead lists the commuter’s destination, so fellow travelers can wake him when it’s time to disembark.

PORTABLE CROSSWALK.
Finding a safe place to cross the street can be a challenge. But now there’s the Portable Crosswalk, a roll-up mat that’s printed with white stripes. Simply choose a spot, unroll the crosswalk into the street, and walk out into traffic.

HAY FEVER HAT.
Perfect for allergy sufferers, this headgear consists of a roll of toilet paper that sits on top of your head,
secured by a halo-shaped frame and chinstrap. At the first sign of a sneeze, just reach up and pull.

SWEETHEART’S TRAINING ARM.
Teach your loved one to hold hands properly with this artificial limb. Designed to dangle by your side as you walk down the street, the Training Arm lets your boyfriend or girlfriend perfect their hand-holding techniques—pressure, duration, finger position, etc.—without subjecting you to embarrassing sweaty palms.

AUTOMATED NOODLE COOLER.
Who hasn’t put a forkful of noodles in their mouth, only to find out that they’re scalding hot? The Noodle Cooler solves all that. A small battery-operated fan attaches to your fork, spoon, or chopsticks, blowing a cooling breeze across the noodles as you bring them to your mouth. (Also works for soups or stews.)

CAT TONGUE SOOTHER.
Designed for anyone who feeds their cat hot “people food,” this invention does for cats what the Noodle Cooler does for humans. This little fan attaches to the rim of the cat’s food bowl, cooling the meal to a safe temperature.

AUTOMATIC CHEW COUNTER.
Experts agree: Most people don’t chew their food enough. For a strong jaw and good digestion, adults should chew at least 2,000 times per average meal. But who keeps count? Enter the Chew Counter, a strap that runs under the jaw and records each chew on a digital readout. Also recommended for dieters, who can practice “vigorous air-chewing.”

PERSONAL RAIN SAVER.
With fresh water becoming such a valuable resource, it’s a shame that so much of it is washed into gutters on rainy days. Now you can capture your own rainwater with this device, an inside-out umbrella that you hold over your head. A drain in the handle siphons rainwater into your own shoulder-harnessed reservoir tank. As the description says, “Every drop that falls is yours to keep.”