Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (24 page)

In recent years, the word “pedestrian” has come to mean something ordinary. But these pedestrians were
extraordinary
.

Stewart was an English philosopher and writer who got off to a bad start in life. In school he was labeled a dunce, and his frustrated father sent him to work as a clerk for the East India Company in Madras, India, when he was just 17 years old. Sometime around 1765, Stewart left that job…and started walking. Over the next 25 years he walked across India, Persia, Arabia, parts of Africa, through all of Europe, and finally back to Britain. Even when he could have used a horse or carriage, he walked. Then he went to the American colonies and walked some more. “Walking” Stewart, as he became known, went on to become a celebrated character around London. Nobody knows exactly how many miles he walked during his lifetime—but it’s probably in the hundreds of thousands.

One of the English Romantic Era’s greatest poets, Wordsworth, at the age of 20, went on a walking tour of France and Switzerland, during which he walked about 1,000 miles in just a few months. After that he walked for at least a couple of hours nearly every day for the rest of his life. (He was actually a friend of Walking Stewart and was greatly influenced by him.) And that was just his outdoor walking—in addition, he composed his poetry while walking back and forth on his home’s terrace for hours every day. His friend, the poet Thomas de Quincey, estimated that Wordsworth walked some 170,000 miles in his lifetime.

Captain Robert Barclay Allardice of Stonehaven, Scotland, was known as “The Celebrated Pedestrian.” He regularly wagered with people that he could complete some preposterous feat of walking…and then did it. His most impressive feat: In 1809 he bet 1,000 guineas (more than $55,000 in modern value) that he could walk one mile every hour…for 1,000 hours. He started on June 1 in the town of Newmarket, England, walking back and forth
between two half-mile-apart marks, taking about 15 minutes per hour for each mile and grabbing naps when he could. Crowds grew as Barclay marched on and on, and 42 days later thousands watched as he walked his 1,000th mile in the 1,000th hour, a feat that many people have tried to break since, without success. Barclay’s walking bouts were legendary in the U.K., and kicked off what became known as the “Age of Pedestrianism,” during which many people in Europe and the U.S. became professional walkers.

In 1935 Pearsall, a 29-year-old painter from London, tried to use a map to get to a party in the city one evening, but got lost. So she decided that a better map of London was needed—and that she’d make it herself. The next day she got up at 5:00 a.m. and started walking London’s streets, keeping a record of every street as she did. Pearsall walked nearly every day, 18 hours a day, and over the course of the next year walked all 23,000 streets of London—about 3,000 miles. She got a draughtsman to help turn her information into a map booklet, published it, and started the A-Z Map Company. Pearsall ran A-Z until she died at the age of 89, in 1996. It’s still one of the largest map companies in the U.K.

In 1931 Wingo, a restaurateur from Abilene, Texas, lost his restaurant in the financial stress of the Great Depression. After hearing about people who’d dealt with the difficulties by doing stunts—pole-sitting was a craze at the time—Wingo decided to pull one of his own. He got some sponsors and started walking east from Fort Worth, Texas…backward. The stunt became bigger news the farther he went; crowds and headlines awaited him in every town he entered. And that was just the start: Wingo walked all the way to New York, then walked backward up a ship’s gangplank, sailed to Europe, and continued walking (backward) from there, eventually reaching the Pacific Ocean. He sailed to Santa Monica, California, and then walked (backward, still) home to Texas. It took him 18 months to complete his round-the-world walk, and by the end he was an international celebrity. In 1976, at the age of 81, Wingo completed a shortened version of the feat to celebrate the nation’s bicentennial, walking backward from San Francisco to Santa Monica (and then appeared on
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
).

•
In November 2008, a 13-year-old student at Spectrum Junior-Senior High School in Stuart, Florida, was arrested by the campus law enforcement officer for “continually disrupting his classroom environment by intentionally breaking wind.” After his arrest, the young man, who was not named in police reports, was released into the custody of his mother. (No word on whether he’ll have to do time in the
can
.)

• In a similar story, 34-year-old Jose Cruz of Charleston, West Virginia, was charged with battery after he farted in a police station and fanned the fumes in the direction of a police officer. Cruz, who was originally stopped by traffic cops for driving without headlights, had been taken to the police department for a breathalyzer test after failing a field sobriety test. (In his defense, Cruz says he only farted because his request to use the men’s room was denied, and he insists he never fanned his gas at the cops.) At last report, the fart-and-battery charge had been dropped, but Cruz still had to answer for the DUI charge.

In January 2009, NASA announced that huge plumes of methane gas had been discovered in the atmosphere of Mars in three different locations. On Earth, 90% of all methane is produced by living things, and that leads scientists to speculate that the methane detected on Mars may also have been created by living things—Martian farts! The most likely form of life on Mars is simple bacteria, living deep underground. And even if the bacteria died off millions of years ago, the gas may only now be rising to the Martian surface. The other 10% of the methane in Earth’s atmosphere is caused by geological activity not related to any living things, so it’s also possible that lifeless geological processes are causing the plumes. Still, says NASA researcher Michael Mumma, “Nothing else has done as much to increase the chances of finding life.”

For
Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader
, we compiled a
list of old-time slang words that all mean “drunk”—looped, bombed,
blotto, etc. Well, that was a few years ago, and we’ve had a few
drinks since then, so here’s a whole new list. (Hiccup!)

he Plaintiff:
Batman, Turkey

 

The Defendants:
Warner Bros., producer of the Batman films, and Christopher Nolan, director of two Batman films
The Lawsuit:
Batman is a city in southeastern Turkey, named after the nearby Bati Raman Mountains, and it was founded in the 1920s, before the first appearance of the superhero Batman in DC Comics in 1939. But in November 2008—around the same time that Warner’s Batman movie
The Dark Knight
was accumulating $1 billion in worldwide ticket sales, the Turkish Batman threatened to sue the American Batman makers for monetary damages. Huseyin Kalkan, Batman’s mayor, claimed that the psychological impact over the city losing its “identity” to a superhero was to blame for its high number of unsolved murders. Further, he said that residents living abroad should be able to name their businesses after their hometown—they currently cannot due to trademark law.
The Verdict:
As of 2009, Batman (the city) was still preparing its paperwork, but the case probably won’t go very far. Since Batman (the character) has been around since 1939, the statute of limitations has likely run out on suing for trademark infringement.

 

The Plaintiff:
Scott Gomez Jr.

The Defendant:
Pueblo County Jail, Colorado

The Lawsuit:
In 2007 Gomez was serving time as an inmate at the Pueblo County Jail when he tried to escape. He melted the ceiling tiles of his cell with a homemade candle, climbed out, got to the roof, and attempted to scale down the outside wall of the prison. Instead, he fell 40 feet to the pavement below and was severely injured. Gomez sued the jail, arguing that prison guards were responsible for his injuries because they should have done more to stop him from escaping. Specifically, they “failed to provide ceiling tiles that could not be removed by melting them with a homemade candle” and ignored his “propensity to escape” (he’d tried to escape twice before).

 

The Verdict:
Lawyers for the prison pointed out a Colorado state law that prevented citizens from suing for damages sustained while committing a felony…such as escaping from prison. Case dismissed.