Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader (35 page)

NUDE:
Police at the Los Angeles International Airport arrested Neil Melly, 31, of Canada, after he stripped naked, climbed over the airport fence, ran across the airfield, and climbed into the wheel well of an airplane as it was backing away from the departure gate. Melly was mad at Qantas Airlines because it refused to sell him a ticket when he tried to pay for it with a credit card receipt instead of an actual credit card. Airport officials say they “will look into improving the fence.”

PRUDE:
In the fall of 2004 the dean of students at Vermont’s Bennington College declared war against the college’s longtime unofficial policy of being “clothing optional.” Why? One student went naked during freshman orientation (when lots of parents were visiting). Dean Robert Graves decided he’d seen enough. “We don’t live in a clothing-optional society,” he told reporters. Students immediately made plans to protest the ban…in the nude. (But in the spring, after the weather improved.)

Siberia gets so cold that boiling water poured from a pan can freeze before it hits the ground.

FAMOUS DROPOUTS

Quitters never win…or do they?

A
BSENT ANCHORS
. Peter Jennings was a poor student in high school and only lasted until 10th grade. Tom Brokaw, the president of the student body in high school, dropped out of the University of Iowa after, as he put it, he “majored in beer and coeds for a couple of years.”

WAYWARD WRITERS
. Their books are required reading in many high schools and universities, but neither Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, George Bernard Shaw, William Faulkner, nor Jack London finished school themselves.

CLASS-CUTTING COMMANDERS
. U.S. presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, Martin van Buren, and Grover Cleveland all had little or no formal education. British Prime Minister John Major didn’t finish high school.

FORBES-LIST FLUNKIES
. Microsoft’s Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, was a college dropout. John D. Rockefeller never finished high school. Neither did Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, or Virgin’s Richard Branson. Dave Thomas of Wendy’s and Ray Kroc of McDonald’s also dropped out—but they got jobs in fast food.

ERRANT ENTERTAINERS
. Robert De Niro, Humphrey Bogart, Sean Connery, Walt Disney, Quentin Tarantino, and Patrick Stewart never finished school. Musical misfits include Frank Sinatra, Elton John, and composers Irving Berlin and George Gershwin. Sonny Bono, who later became a U.S. congressman, dropped out of school in the 10th grade.

NON-PASSING PIONEERS
. Wilbur and Orville Wright were dropouts. Thomas Edison left school to educate himself, as did Albert Einstein. Einstein did go back to earn a doctorate of physics in 1905, but later offered this warning: “If one studies too zealously, one easily loses his pants.”

Because he directed the movie
Kundun
, Martin Scorsese is banned from Tibet.

THE BODY FARM

Ahh, Tennessee—home to Dollywood, Graceland, the Grand Ole Opry…and the world’s creepiest research facility
.

P
UTRIFIED FOREST
The Anthropological Research Facility (ARF) of the University of Tennessee lies on three landscaped acres behind the UT Medical Center parking lot. Aside from the razor-wire fence, it looks like a lovely wooded park, complete with people lying on their backs enjoying a pleasant day in the sun. That is, until you smell the foul odor. A second glance tells you these sunbathers are not all on their backs: some are face down in the leaves; some are waist deep in the dirt. Others are encased in concrete or wrapped in plastic garbage bags or locked in car trunks. None of them seems to be enjoying anything. Why? They’re all cadavers, planted by scientists from the University of Tennessee for the sole purpose of studying the decomposition of the human body.

Nicknamed “the Body Farm” by the FBI, this research facility develops and provides medical expertise to law enforcement professionals and medical examiners. It helps them pinpoint the exact time of death of a body—a critical part of any criminal investigation involving a cadaver.

DR. DEATH

ARF (or “BARF,” as local critics call it) was founded in 1971 by forensic anthropologist Dr. William Bass. He had been asked to guess the age of a skeleton dug up on a piece of property once owned by a Confederate Army colonel named William Shy. Bass had examined some Civil War–era remains before, but they were mostly dust. Since this skeleton still had pieces of flesh attached to it, his analysis was able to determine that the person was a white male between 24 and 28 years old, who’d been dead about a year. Bass was correct about the race, gender, and age, but way off on the time of death. The skeleton, it turned out, belonged to William Shy himself, who was buried in 1864—107 years earlier. “I realized,” Bass later recalled, “there was something here about decomposition we didn’t know.” He started the facility to help fill in the gaps.

Isuzu means “50 bells” in Japanese.

RIGOR MORTIS 101

The first corpses Bass and his team studied were bodies that had gone unclaimed at the morgue. At first they had four to five cadavers a year. Today all cadavers are donated by personal request and there’s a waiting list. ARF researchers currently work with around 45 bodies a year.

“We go through the FBI reports and come up with the most common way a perpetrator will bury someone, and use these as our models,” says Dr. Arpad Vass, a senior researcher at the facility. ARF scientists and graduate students then study the rate of
algor mortis
—the cooling of the body. The temperature of a corpse drops approximately 1°F per hour until it matches the temperature of the air around it—a useful clue for determining time of death.
Rigor mortis
—the stiffening of the body—generally starts a few hours after death and moves through the body, disappearing 48 hours later. If a body has been dead longer than three days, they look for other clues: What bugs have arrived to help with the decomposition? How old are the fly larvae? Are there beetles?

This process of
insect succession
(which species of insect feed on a decaying corpse, and in what order), as well as the effects of weather and climate on decomposition, are all closely monitored and measured. The scientists use this data to develop methods and instruments that accurately establish time of death. This expertise is shared with law enforcement agencies all over the world.

WHAT’S THAT SMELL?

Dr. Vass’s research has shown that a body emits 450 chemicals at different stages of its decay. Each stage has a unique “bouquet,” which Vass has given names such as
putrescine
and
cadaverine
. Using the same aroma scan technology used in the food and wine industry, one of his students is developing a handheld electronic “nose” for the FBI that will sniff out the time of death by identifying the presence of these different chemicals in a corpse.

Synthetic putrescine and cadaverine are now used to train “human remains dogs” (not to be confused with police dogs who search for escaped criminals). These dogs respond to the specific scent of death they’ve been trained to recognize, and they do it with amazing accuracy: They can tell their trainers whether a lake is concealing a corpse by sniffing the water’s surface for minute bubbles of gas seeping from a rotting carcass underwater, and they can show police exactly where to dive to retrieve the body. The dogs can detect the faintest scent of a dead body on the ground, even if it was removed from the spot a year earlier.

Too much coffee? Snakes sleep with both eyes open.

Another researcher at ARF, Dr. Richard Jantz, has developed a computer program that can determine the gender, race, and height of an unknown skeleton. This software has been invaluable in helping forensic teams identify the victims of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Rwanda, and other war crime sites.

BREAKING IT DOWN

Warning: the following may require a strong stomach
.

• Rigor mortis sets in just after death. The body stiffens, first at the jaws and neck. After 48 hours, the corpse relaxes and muscles sag.

• During the first 24 hours, the body cools at a rate of about 1°F per hour until it matches the temperature of the air around it. This is called
algor mortis
. Next, blood settles in the part of the body closest to the ground, turning the rest of the body pale.

• After two to three days,
putrefaction
is underway. The skin turns green and the body’s enzymes start to eat through cell walls and the liquid inside leaks out. At this stage, fly larvae, or maggots, invade and start to eat the corpse’s body fat. The maggots carry with them bacteria that settle in the abdomen, lungs, and skin.

• The bacteria feed on the liquid and release sulfur gas as a waste product. With nowhere to go, the gas causes the corpse to bloat and swell (and sometimes burst). By the end of the third day, the skin changes from green to purple to black. This stage is called
autolysis
, which means “self-digestion.”

• Next is
skin slip
. As cells continue to break down, liquid continues to leak. After about a week, it builds up between layers of skin and loosens it, causing skin to start to peel off in large chunks.

• After two weeks, the fluid leaks from the nose and mouth. After three weeks, teeth and nails loosen; internal organs start to rupture.

• After about a month, the bacteria and enzymes have liquified all body tissue until the corpse dissolves and sinks into the ground, leaving only the skeletal remains and what’s called a
volatile fatty acid stain
. Sweet dreams...

Handyman hint: Keeping mothballs in your tool chest will help prevent rust.

VIDEO STINKERS

Over the years we’ve recommended dozens of great movies in our “Video Treasures” pages. But there are lots of bad ones out there, too—some so bad that they’re actually fun to watch. So here’s our compilation of the crème de la crud
.

X
ANADU
(1980)
Musical
Review:
“Olivia Newton-John is Kira, the daughter of Zeus and a muse who is the inspiration for fine art everywhere. She descends to Earth to come to the aid of a talented artist (Michael Beck) and a former big band clarinetist (Gene Kelly in his final film) and helps them open their dream disco dance club. No, seriously, that’s her divine mission.” (Bad
Cinema Society) Director:
Robert Greenwald.

BABY GENIUSES (1999)
Family

Review: “Unless you want to see walking, talking toddlers hypnotizing Dom DeLuise into picking his nose, steer clear of this clinker about a power-mad child psychologist who’s raising these bright babies in her lab. If these babies are such geniuses, why can’t they spark even a single laugh?” (
Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide
)
Stars:
Kathleen Turner, Christopher Lloyd.
Director:
Bob Clark.

THEODORE REX (1995)
Science Fiction

Review: “Futuristic comedy finds cynical, seasoned cop Katie Coltrane being teamed with Teddy, an eight-foot-tall, three-ton, returned-from-extinction Tyrannosaurus Rex.”
(Videohound’s Golden Movie Retriever)
Star: Whoopi Goldberg.
Director:
Jonathan Betuel.

MOMENT BY MOMENT (1978)
Romance

Review:
“Ever wonder what could possibly make you kill yourself? How about watching a young John Travolta prance around in his underwear for two hours and romance his mom? At least that’s our interpretation of his creepy relationship with Lily Tomlin, his domineering 40-year-old look-alike lover. Coincidentally,
Moment
was released the same year as the mass suicide at Jonestown.”
(Maxim’s 50 Worst Movies of All Time) Director:
Jane Wagner.

M&M colors once included violet.

GYMKATA (1985)
Action

Review:
“Olympic gymnast Kurt Thomas is recruited by the CIA to go fight to the death so they can stick a nuclear missile base in the middle of an Eastern European country. So Kurt has to run through alleys until he finds one that happens to have a horizontal bar set up between two buildings, then he grabs the bar and starts spinning and kicking guys. Apparently the reason this was filmed in Yugoslavia is that the whole country has gymnastics equipment hidden in the rocks and sticking out of buildings, and it gives Kurt a big advantage over the guys with machine guns.” (Joe
Bob Briggs’ Ultimate B-Movie Guide
)
Director:
Robert Clouse.

MAD DOG TIME (1996)
Drama/Comedy

Review:
“A gangster boss is released from a mental hospital and returns to a sleazy nightclub to take control of his organization. The way the movie works is two or three characters start out in a scene and recite some dry, hard-boiled dialogue, and then one or two of them gets shot. This happens over and over. The first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time.”
(Roger Ebert) Stars:
Richard Dreyfuss, Jeff Goldblum, Diane Lane.
Director:
Larry Bishop.