Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (6 page)

“Of course I can keep secrets. It’s the people I tell them to that can’t keep them.”

—
Anthony Haden-Guest

Nearly every weekday for 30 years, John Beatty drove his pickup truck across San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge on his way to and from work. One morning in late 2007, the 50-year-old electrician suddenly came up on a slow-moving Jeep Grand Cherokee. He hit the brakes and went to pass the Jeep, only to see the driver slumped over the steering wheel. “It began to cross into the fast lane, and people were using that lane to pass her,” Beatty later said. “On the other side of the road, traffic was flying northbound. I thought, ‘I’m not letting this happen.’” He drove in front of the Jeep and let it hit his pickup. Displaying some impressive driving skills, Beatty was able to steer the SUV toward the right lane. At first, other drivers honked impatiently at the slow procession, but once they understood what was happening, they gave Beatty the space he needed to get the Jeep safely off the road. Sadly, the unconscious driver later died from her condition, but California Highway Patrol officers credit Beatty with preventing what could have been a deadly collision into oncoming highway traffic. “I lead a kind of low-key life,” admitted Beatty. “Excitement’s not my bag.”

Veeramuthu Kalimuthu, known as Kali, stood on a subway platform during a busy New York City afternoon rush hour in 2008. A new train rolled in every three minutes, and Kali’s was about a minute away. That’s when he heard screams and saw that a man had fallen onto the tracks from the platform on the opposite side of the station. Kali watched and waited for someone to help, but no one did. Knowing time was running out, he jumped down from his own side onto the train tracks, and then jumped over the third rail, which carries 600 deadly volts of electricity. When he finally got across, Kali—at 5’5” and 150 pounds—realized the man was nearly
twice his size…and unconscious (he’d been drinking). Kali tried to lift the man, but was unable to get him all the way up onto the platform. He did, however, lift him high enough so that people up on top could pull him to safety. Then, as bystanders applauded, Kali jumped back over the third rail and quickly scooted up to his own platform just in time to catch his train home. Kali’s humble explanation of his good deed: “People should help people.”

At around 11:00 a.m. on a Monday in April 2008, mail carrier Lisa Harrell walked into a front yard in Albany, New York, to deliver an Express Mail package. Harrell, a 13-year Postal Service veteran, stepped up onto the porch and rang the bell. All of a sudden, something brushed her shoulder. Without thinking, Harrell extended her arms and discovered that she was holding a baby. The one-year-old girl was crying but otherwise fine. Had Harrell not been there, the infant would have landed on the concrete. The mother ran outside, grabbed her daughter, thanked Harrell, and then ran off to her own mother’s house down the street. (It was later revealed that the baby had been sitting on a bed next to an open window when she rolled out.) Making the story even stranger, normally Harrell wouldn’t have been at that house until after 2:00 p.m., but because she was delivering an Express Mail package that day, she had to get there by noon. “I was pretty shaken up,” said Harrell. “I couldn’t finish the route.”

In Fenton, Missouri, a man who was later identified only as “Jerry” heard some strange noises coming from his neighbor’s apartment. Aware that the woman who lived there wasn’t home, he had a gut feeling that it was an intruder. So Jerry went outside and kicked open his neighbor’s door. Whoever was inside slammed it shut again and locked it. So Jerry waited outside until his neighbor returned home. When she did, she told him that no one should have been inside her place. They called the police, who came and apprehended the intruder—later revealed to be an ex-con who’d planned to wait in the apartment and attack the woman when she arrived home. Police hailed Jerry as a hero. One other thing about him: He’s legally blind.

 

FINGER.
Finnish computer programmer Jerry Jalava lost his ring finger in a motorcycle accident. He replaced it with a prosthetic finger of his own design—it’s also a computer flash drive. It looks like a normal finger (a shiny plastic one), but Jalava can pull back the nail, plug it into the USB slot on his computer, and store data files. (Ironically, these drives are sometimes called “thumb drives.”)

 

KNEE.
Brad Halling served in the Army’s Special Forces during the 1993 U.S. intervention in Somalia. A grenade hit his helicopter, and Halling lost his leg in the attack. In 2007 he received the most sophisticated joint replacement ever built: the Power Knee. Connected to two prosthetic leg parts, a microprocessor in the $100,000 device receives a signal from a small transmitter strapped to Halling’s other leg. The microprocessor senses how he’s moving and directs the robotic knee’s electric motor to copy the muscle movements. In short, he can walk normally. The downsides: It makes a loud whirring noise and has to be charged every night.

 

EYE.
Canadian filmmaker Rob Spence lost the use of his right eye in a childhood gun accident. So, inspired by the tiny camera on his cell phone, in 2009, Spence decided to make the ultimate first-person-POV film…by installing a prosthetic eye that is also a camera. A team from the University of Toronto is building the eye-camera (or “Eyeborg,” as Spence calls it), which will record video and send it wirelessly to a computer.

 

BONES.
Researchers in the U.S. military may have found a way to regenerate human limbs. They use a technique called
nanoscaf-folding
, in which tiny, cell-sized nets made of fiber optics hundreds of times thinner than a human hair are attached to the end of a missing limb. This structure acts as a framework where cells can congregate and bond into bones and tissue, growing through tiny holes in the scaffolding. The procedure isn’t quite ready to try out on humans yet, but scientists believe that one day it may also be used to generate new organs.

“I ate a bug once. It was flying around me. I was trying to get it away. It went right in my mouth. It was so gross!”

—
Hilary Duff

 

“I used to think I actually
was
Batman.”

—
Justin Timberlake

 

“I’d kiss a frog even if there was no promise of a Prince Charming popping out of it. I love frogs.”

—
Cameron Diaz

 

 

 

“I always cry when I watch myself on-screen.”

—
Clint Eastwood

 

“I like cars and basketball. But you know what I like more? Bananas.”

—
Frankie Muniz

 

“What kills me is that everybody thinks I like jazz.”

—
Samuel L. Jackson

 

“I’m horrible to live with. I forget to flush the toilet.”

—
Megan Fox

 

“The kindest word to describe my performance in school was ‘sloth.’”

—
Harrison Ford

 

“I cheated a lot at school. I just couldn’t sit and do homework. I usually sat next to someone extremely smart.”

—
Leonardo DiCaprio

 

“All reporters ask exactly the same questions, and I say exactly the same answers. I don’t have to think; I can just stand there like a broken record going LALALA….”

—
Emma Watson

 

“I don’t keep track of paper that well. My desk is a mess.”

—
Barack Obama

 

“I’ve never seen a phone bill of mine in my life.”

—
Paris Hilton

 

“I used to use the name ‘Mr. Stench.’ It was funny to be in a posh hotel and hear a very proper concierge call out, ‘Mr. Stench, please.’”

—
Johnny Depp

James Miller’s girlfriend broke up with him in early 2009. So on Valentine’s Day, the 19-year-old British carpenter dressed up like Cupid (wearing only boxer shorts) and ran across the field at a Premier League soccer match shooting roses with a bow and arrow toward his lost love, who was sitting in the stands. Did it work? “If he honestly thought I would be impressed, then he must be more stupid than he looks,” she said. Adding insult to injury, Miller was banned from the stadium for three years and fired from his job. “That sort of behavior always works some romantic magic in the movies,” he said. “Now I have no girlfriend and no job.”

When police arrived on the scene in Palm City, Florida, in April 2009, Derick Culberson, 22, was sitting next to his truck—his hands and ankles bound with zip ties. He told them he’d been robbed at gunpoint by two men. More than a dozen officers began to canvass the area…until a cop happened to notice the same brand of zip ties in Culberson’s truck. When confronted by cops, Culberson admitted he’d made the whole thing up. Why? His girlfriend had recently left him, and he wanted her to hear about his “ordeal” and feel sorry for him and take him back. (She didn’t.)

After working a 14-hour day as a courier in Christchurch, New Zealand, 18-year-old Tim Roberts wanted nothing more than to go to sleep, but his fiancée got upset when he tried to call off their movie date. So Roberts grudgingly showed up at the theater just as the romantic comedy was starting. He was fast asleep within minutes. When he awoke, he was all by himself in the dark, locked theater, the movie having long since ended. Upset that his fiancée had left him there, and still groggy from having been asleep, he stumbled out into the lobby…and tripped the security alarm. “It was this horrible, ear-piercing, screeching sound,” he said. Roberts tried to
leave, but the doors couldn’t be opened without keys. The situation got scary when the police rushed the building with their guns drawn. Somehow, Roberts was able to communicate his dilemma, and finally got out via the fire escape. The episode convinced the couple that they weren’t as compatible as they thought they were, and they made a “mutual” decision to call off their engagement.

In 2007 a married couple in Connecticut (names not released to the press) began receiving strange phone calls that were very sexually suggestive, and all for the wife. The husband did a Web search and discovered that his wife had posted several lewd profiles on adult dating sites. She flat-out denied it, so he asked around and found the real culprit: his ex-girlfriend, Pilar Stofega, who was hell-bent on breaking up the couple. Stofega, 34, was arrested and charged with second-degree harassment. When asked why she did it, she explained, “To be vindictive.”

Victoria Thorp, 19, was so desperate to see her boyfriend that she broke
into
a detention center in Gainesville, Florida, where he was being held on drug charges. Her boyfriend, 18-year-old Aquilla Wilson, was equally desperate to get
out
, so he jumped out of the window that she had come in through. When the guards arrived, he was gone, and she was still there. Thorp was charged for “aiding in a prisoner’s escape.” She was jailed; he remains at large.

After 18 years of marriage, a Cambodian man named Moeun Sarim accused his wife, Vat Navy, of having an affair with a policeman in their town. She denied it, but he didn’t believe her. He filed for divorce in October 2008, and in the settlement, he got half of their estate—literally. He and some of his relatives showed up at the 20-by-24-foot wooden house with saws in hand. Police tried to talk him out of it, but Sarim was adamant. The sawers started cutting the house right down the middle, loading the parts into pickup trucks. The remaining half of the house—although a bit draftier—was still structurally sound, so Navy kept living there. “Very strange,” she said, “but this is what he wanted.”