Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (62 page)

 

“I could be the poster boy for bad judgement.”

—
Rob Lowe

 

“My biggest nightmare is I’m driving home and get sick and go to the hospital. ‘Please help me,’ I ask. And they say: ‘Hey, you look like…’ And I’m dying while they’re wondering whether or not I’m Barbra Streisand.”

—
Barbra Streisand

 

“I had my first childhood depression at eight. It was severe, intense, hole-in-the-soul loneliness. No one noticed.”

—
Ashley Judd

 

“Life is like a B-picture script! It is that corny. If I had my life story offered to me to film, I’d probably turn it down.”

—
Kirk Douglas

Christopher Nolan’s
Batman Begins
and
The Dark Knight
are dark, gritty reimaginings of Batman’s origins, but they could have been even darker and grittier. In 2001 Warner Bros. executives’ first choice to create a new Batman series was writer/director Darren Aronofsky (
Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler
). Aronofsky’s script was a complete overhaul of Batman—Bruce Wayne was an orphaned, homeless teenager who uses an abandoned subway station as a “batcave,” installs a bus engine in an old Lincoln for his “batmobile,” and randomly and brutally murders street thugs. The idea of Batman as a mentally ill, violent, homeless psychopath was too much for Warner Bros. They let Aronofsky go and hired Nolan.

The popular ’90s band Green Day enjoyed a comeback in 2004 with
American Idiot
, a concept album about the coming-of-age of a weirdo named Jesus of Suburbia who lived in a boring, anonymous suburb. It sold 14 million copies and told a complete story, so the idea to turn it into a movie à la the Who’s
Tommy
or Pink Floyd’s
The Wall
seemed like a no-brainer. The band talked to numerous directors and screenwriters throughout 2005 before lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong decided to write the script himself. Just a few months later, though, putting together a big-budget movie-musical proved to be too much work. So Armstrong adapted his script into a stage musical, and
American Idiot: The Musical
premiered at the Berkeley Rep, a major West Coast theater, in 2009.

Willis O’Brien was an animation pioneer who made the stop-motion segments of the giant ape (and the dinosaurs) in the
original
King Kong
(1933)
.
In 1961, with the availability of color film, he set about making a sequel to
Kong.
His idea: Kong would fight a 20-foot-tall Frankenstein monster in downtown San Francisco. Almost immediately, O’Brien changed his idea because he thought securing the rights to Frankenstein from Universal Studios would be too difficult. (In reality, Universal owned only the rights to the look of the monster as characterized by Boris Karloff—green skin and neck bolts.) He changed the title to
King Kong vs. Prometheus
(a reference to Mary Shelley’s original novel,
Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus).
But by then, producer John Beck, to whom O’Brien had shown his screenplay and concept art, had sold the idea to Toho Studios of Japan, who used it to make
King Kong vs. Godzilla.
O’Brien only found out about it when that film was released in 1962. He died just a few months later.

In 1985, shortly after he’d purchased the rights to dozens of Beatles songs, Michael Jackson licensed some of them to animation producer Don Bluth (
The Secret of N.I.M.H.
) for use in a new Beatles-based cartoon called
Strawberry Fields Forever,
to be done in the style of the 1967 animated film
Yellow Submarine.
It wasn’t going to be a sequel, though. It was going to be more like
Fantasia
: a series of vignettes, each based on and scored by a different Beatles song. Bluth planned to computer-animate the entire movie, which would have been a first. He hired a computer animator named Hank Grebe, who drew sketches and prepared 10 minutes of test footage in which he completely revamped the project as Beatles “characters” (Mean Mr. Mustard, the Walrus, Mr. Kite, etc.) in a 1940s gangster movie.
Strawberry Fields
died when none of the surviving Beatles would allow their (animated) images to be used in the film.

dodunk • muttonhead • hunky • shuttle-wit • dumbsocks Boobus Americanus • clinchpoop • yuckel • droob • slangrill lorg • flapdoodle • gazook • jobbernoll • ning-nong • sonky zib • slubberdegullion • oofus • wooden spoon • peagoose

With the Hawaiian Islands united as a kingdom since 1810, King Kalakaua ascended to the throne in 1874. The following year, he signed the Reciprocity Treaty with the United States. Hawaii won the right to sell sugar to the U.S. duty- and tax-free; the U.S. won the right to build the Pearl Harbor naval base on Oahu. Here’s the rest of Hawaii’s timeline to statehood.

 

• 1887:
The Honolulu Rifles, an armed militia of mostly American and European sugar-plantation owners, force King Kalakaua to sign the Constitution of the Kingdom of Hawaii. It strips the king of most of his power, turning Hawaii into a constitutional monarchy. Voting rights are restricted to males over 20 who own property and are not of Asian descent. This disenfranchises almost all natives.

 

• 1891:
Upon the death of Kalakaua, his sister Liliuokalani takes over the monarchy. Resentful that non-natives have taken over, she nullifies the Constitution. This angers the ruling whites, as does the McKinley Tariff, passed by Congress, which repeals the tax-free trade of sugar. The whites seek annexation to the U.S. to reacquire duty-free status.

 

• 1893:
The pro-annexation Committee of Public Safety, led by American Ambassador John L. Stevens, calls in 200 troops to intimidate Liliuokalani. It works; she relinquishes all control. On February 1, Hawaii becomes a protectorate of the United States.

 

• 1898:
Under the direct order of President William McKinley (the same McKinley of the McKinley Tariff), the U.S. annexes Hawaii and the white aristocracy runs it as a dependent republic.

 

• 1900:
Congress passes the Hawaii Organic Act, reclassifying the protectorate as a territory. Citizenship—and the right to vote for a local legislature—is given to all adult males. Hawaii gets a nonvoting delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives.

 

• 1903:
The Hawaii legislature passes a resolution to petition

Congress for the right to draw up a state constitution, the first step to statehood. Congress denies the request.

 

• 1919:
Congressional delegate Prince Kalanianaole (son of King Kalakaua) introduces the first of many statehood bills. All fail when members of Congress express fear that the islands might fall under the control of the increasingly imperialistic Japanese.

 

• 1934:
In a move to boost the mainland sugar industry in the middle of the Depression, Congress passes the Jones-Costigan Act, which severely limits foreign sugar imports. Hawaii is classified as a foreign importer, crippling the sugar trade there. White plantation owners quickly form a statehood exploratory committee.

 

• 1937:
Congress holds statehood hearings in Hawaii and recommends that it be put to a local vote. Hawaiians approve the referendum in 1940 by a two-to-one margin.

 

• 1941:
The naval base at Pearl Harbor is bombed by the Japanese, and the U.S. enters World War II. The drive for statehood is postponed; Hawaii is placed under martial law until 1944.

 

• 1947:
Based on the pre-war statehood vote, statehood is put to a vote on the House floor. It passes, 196 to 133.

 

• 1948:
Sen. Hugh Butler, chairman of the Rules Committee, which oversees new statehood proposals, kills a Hawaii statehood bill in committee because he believes the Hawaiian Democratic Party has been infiltrated by Communists.

 

• 1949:
To demonstrate to Congress that it is ready for democracy (and is not Communist), the territorial legislature writes a state constitution, hoping to lead Congress into granting statehood.

 

• 1953:
Hawaii delegate Joseph Farrington proposes another statehood bill. It passes the House. The Senate approves it in 1954 but joins it to a pending Alaskan statehood bill. Back to the House for approval, it dies there, as Speaker Joseph Martin favors statehood for Hawaii alone and not Alaska.

 

• 1959:
Shortly after Alaska is admitted as the 49th state, the Senate passes the Hawaii Statehood Bill. More than 94 percent of Hawaiian voters approve. On August 21, President Dwight Eisenhower signs a proclamation making Hawaii the 50th state.

How many ghost stories get written up in medical journals? This one
made it into the
American Journal of Ophthalmology
in 1921.
Read on…if you dare. (Part I starts on page 110.)

According to Dr. William Wilmer’s account, everyone in the H family had heard unexplainable noises and sensed eerie presences, but no one had actually
seen
any ghosts… until January 1913. Mrs. H saw them first: “On one occasion, in the middle of the morning, as I passed from the drawing room into the dining room, I was surprised to see at the further end of the drawing room, coming towards me, a strange woman, dark haired and dressed in black. As I walked steadily on into the dining room to meet her, she disappeared,” she wrote. “This happened three different times.” Another night one of the servants awoke to see an old man and a young woman sitting at the foot of her bed, staring at her. She lay in bed paralyzed until an unseen hand tapped her shoulder and she was suddenly able to sit up. But as she did so, the man and woman vanished.

One night Mr. and Mrs. H went to the opera, leaving their children in the care of the servants. That evening at about 8:30, the H’s young son was awakened by the ghost of a “big, fat man” that sent him screaming from his room. The boy spent the rest of the night sleeping fitfully in the nanny’s room, and when he awoke the following morning he complained that someone or something heavy—perhaps the fat man?—had sat on his chest the entire night, making it difficult for him to breathe.

Mr. and Mrs. H fared no better: After they returned home from the opera and went to bed, Mr. H was awakened by the sensation of ghostly fingers grabbing his throat and trying to strangle him. He still heard ringing bells at night, and now they were complemented by the sounds of people moving through the house. He
assumed the noises were made by burglars, but every time he got up to confront the intruders, they were nowhere to be seen. And, Mrs. H wrote,“it was about this time my houseplants died.”

If only one person had seen or heard unusual things in the house, they could easily have been dismissed as the figments of an overactive imagination. But
everyone
in the house was now seeing, hearing, and even feeling things. And besides: You can’t kill houseplants with figments of someone’s imagination.

Whatever was happening in the house, it was very real. When they contacted the home’s previous residents, the H’s learned that the bizarre events had been going on for many years. “The last occupants we found had exactly the same experiences as ourselves,” Mrs. H wrote, “with the exception that some of them had seen visions clad in purple and white crawling around their beds. Going back still further, we learned that almost everyone had felt ill and had been under the doctor’s care, although nothing very definite had been found the matter with them.”

The first hint of what might really be happening came in late January, after Mr. H described the terrifying goings-on to his brother. Brother H remembered an article he’d read years before, describing a family that had been tormented by the same kinds of sounds and visions that his brother described. Brother H suggested that perhaps Mr. H and his family were being poisoned.

Poisoned?
Now, on top of everything else, the ghosts were poisoning them? No, Brother H explained: The article he’d read said the family in question had had a faulty heater that released large quantities of carbon monoxide gas into the home, and that all of the symptoms the family experienced—depression, fatigue, illness, strange noises and visions, the feeling of being watched and even touched by unseen people, even dead houseplants—were entirely consistent with carbon monoxide poisoning. Brother H suggested they contact a doctor.