Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (72 page)

“It’s not true that life is one damn thing after another; it’s one damn thing over and over.”

—
Edna St. Vincent Millay

In December 2007, a retired bus driver named Maurice Fox was
rip
-rimanded by the Kirkham Street Sports and Social Club in Paignton, England, for farting too noisily and too often inside the club. Fox, 77, wasn’t stripped of his membership, but he did receive a sternly worded letter from Club secretary George Shepherd asking him to
please
step outside whenever an attack was imminent. Fox denies any deliberate malice: “Sometimes it takes me by surprise and just pops out,” he told
The Guardian
newspaper. Shepherd disagrees: “We’ve had so many complaints over Maurice deliberately lifting himself up off the seat and letting fly,” he says. “The last straw came when he fired off as three ladies came through the front door for a darts match. They were disgusted. We had to act.”

It may sound silly, but the issue is no laughing matter: The burps and farts given off by livestock around the world are thought to produce as much as 25 percent of all methane emissions. That’s pretty serious, because methane is a greenhouse gas that is
25 times
as harmful to the environment as the carbon dioxide given off when fossil fuels are burned. A single cow can emit as much as four tons of methane per year, which is as polluting as driving a midsize car 12,000 miles. Some cattle ranchers in the United States, the U.K., New Zealand, and other countries fear that punitive “fart taxes” are already in the works, though most governments deny it.

In the meantime, the race is on to find ways to minimize the impact that burping, farting livestock have on the environment. Adding fish oil to animal feed has been shown to reduce emissions by up to 21 percent; adding beneficial bacteria to the feed cuts them by up to 70 percent. Another promising idea:
kangaroo farts.
Kangaroos don’t emit any methane when they burp or fart, thanks to bacteria
found in their digestive tracts. Scientists are trying to isolate the bacteria and develop ways to transfer it to cattle, sheep, and other livestock, but that could take several years. Why wait? Some environmentalists argue that people should eat kangaroo in place of other meats. “It’s low in fat, it’s got high protein levels, and it’s very clean in the sense that it’s the ultimate free-range animal,” says Peter Ampt of Australia’s Institute of Environmental Studies.

In 2008 43-year-old Theresa Bailey sued her former employer, the direct–marketing firm Selectabase, demanding compensation for the abuse she suffered at the hands of her boss, David Nye. Bailey, who worked at Selectabase for three months in 2007, claimed that Nye regularly farted in her direction just for laughs. “The number of times he would lift up his bottom off the chair and fart and think it’s funny is unreal,” she says. In addition to the gas attacks, Bailey says she was ordered to wear a badge that read “I’m simple,” after she asked for instructions on how to log phone calls into her computer, and had a beach ball thrown at her head when she took offense at sexist jokes. Bailey won; Selectabase had to pay her £5,146 (about $10,000) but still denied that any of its employees acted in “an inappropriate, unfair, or discriminatory way.”

In March 2009, the Air-O-Matic company of Florida, makers of “Pull My Finger”—a fart-noise generator that was the second-most popular iPhone application sold in the Apple iPhone App Store—threatened legal action against a Colorado company called InfoMedia. They’re the makers of the #1-selling application—the iFart, which is also a fart-noise generator. Air-O-Matic claims that “Pull My Finger” is a protected trademark, and wants InfoMedia to stop using the expression in its marketing materials. InfoMedia argues that the expression is in the
public domain—
no one owns it, so anyone is free to use it. InfoMedia is seeking a declaratory judgement to that effect against Air-O-Matic, which, if granted, would guarantee its right to say “pull my finger” anytime it wants. Air-O-Matic co-founder Sam Magdalein says he hopes that the dispute can be resolved amicably. “Believe it or not, I’m really uncomfortable with bathroom humor. It would be pretty ridiculous to have this end up in court,” he said
.

A In 2009 Baldwin joked on the
Late Show with David Letterman
that he was “thinking about getting a Filipino mail-order bride.” The comment created an uproar in the Philippines, where the practice of mail-order brides is illegal. The government not only banned Baldwin from the country but issued a vague threat. Said Senator (and former action movie star) Ramon “Bong” Revilla Jr.: “Let him try to come here, and he’ll see mayhem.”

According to
American Idol
judge Paula Abdul, Dylan snuck in to a taping of the hit show…twice. “He had a beard and tried to be in disguise,” said Abdul, “but I knew it was him.”

Although she says she likes the “natural look” when it comes to her appearance, in 2008 Aniston brought her personal hairdresser to the U.K. premier of her film
Marley & Me
. According to
Daily Mail
, the actress paid for the hairdresser’s first-class flights, his plush hotel room, and daily expenses for a week, plus the daily fee for his cosmetological duties. Total cost: $59,000. And what did Aniston get for all that? A hair straightening.

One night in 2009, the
Sex and the City
star was pulled over by a police officer for driving without her headlights on. Parker explained that she had recently purchased the Mercedes luxury minivan and hadn’t yet figured out how to work the headlights. The cop showed her how and let her off with a warning. “The officer was very patient,” said Parker’s representative.

While attending a party in the late 1990s, the aging rock star was
introduced to one of his idols, British jazz singer George Melly. “I didn’t expect you to have so many wrinkles,” said Melly. “They’re not wrinkles. They’re laugh lines,” Jagger replied. To which Melly said, “Surely nothing could be
that
funny.”

Whenever he attends a wedding reception, Bacon bribes the DJ $20 to
not
play Kenny Loggins’s title song from the 1984 movie
Footloose
, in which Bacon starred. Reason: If the song comes on, guests form a circle around the actor and expect him to dance.

Hepburn had a phobia of dirty hair and reportedly sniffed the heads of her cast and crew and told them if they needed to wash it. (Another piece of Hepburn gossip: She went through a phase when she was 10 years old—she cut her hair short, wore boys’ clothes, and called herself “Jimmy.”)

In September 2008, Lohan announced that she wanted to hold a fund-raiser for presidential candidate Barack Obama. But Obama’s campaign asked her not to, fearing that Lohan’s former reputation as a “wild party girl” might send the wrong message to undecided voters.

Before becoming an actor in the late 1980s, Pitt had a job driving strippers to and from parties. “It was not a wholesome atmosphere, and it got very depressing,” he says. So Pitt decided to quit, but his boss convinced him to do one last gig. There, he talked to a girl who urged him to take the acting class she was in. “It really set me on the path to where I am now,” he says. “Strippers changed my life.”

When the
Jeopardy!
host was saying his vows at his wedding ceremony in 1990, the officiant asked if he would “take this woman as his lawfully wedded wife.” Trebek replied, “The answer is…Yes!”

 

Loosely based on a real-life San Francisco murder, Frank

Norris’s 1899 novel
McTeague
was all about the destructive power of greed. The main plot: Marcus is engaged to Trina, a German immigrant. One day, Trina falls off a swing and chips a tooth, so Marcus takes her to see his friend McTeague, an unlicensed dentist. Despite Marcus’s objections to gambling (because he can’t afford to play), Trina wins a massive fortune in an underground lottery. They fight, and Trina leaves Marcus for McTeague. But she hoards her money, lives like a pauper, and turns into a hag. Out of jealousy, Marcus gets McTeague’s dental practice shut down. McTeague has no way of making a living, but Trina still won’t share with him, either. So McTeague kills her.

The nearly 500-page novel takes place over two decades, features dozens of other characters and subplots, recurring motifs, and lengthy physical descriptions of the characters and the seedy San Francisco neighborhoods in which they live. The many subtle touches and countless details would make it a hard book to turn into a movie, but silent film director Erich von Stroheim knew he could do it.

Von Stroheim emigrated from Vienna to the United States in 1909 at age 24, and after a few years of odd jobs found work as a crewman on the 1914 silent film epic
The Birth of a Nation.
He parlayed that job into a stint as an actor in World War I-era films, playing loathsome German military captains. Von Stroheim’s portrayals of evil Germans were so popular that his films were marketed as “Starring Erich von Stroheim, the man you love to hate.” In
The Heart of Humanity,
for example, von Stroheim’s character
tears off a nurse’s uniform with his teeth and throws a crying baby out of a window.

But by 1916 the jingoism he’d helped spread backfired on him—Germans were so hated in the United States during and immediately after World War I that von Stroheim couldn’t get work anymore (even though he wasn’t really German—he was Austrian). With no acting work being offered to him, the former movie star was reduced to renting a room in a boarding house in New York City. In his room, he found an old, beat-up copy of
McTeague
left by the previous tenant. The book struck a nerve, especially in how McTeague had suddenly lost his means of employment when others turned on him. Von Stroheim vowed to himself that he’d make a movie out the book someday.