Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader (57 page)

—New
Telegraph
(U.K.)

WEIRDY WOODPECKER

“Car owners in Sullivan, New York, are covering their mirrors in an attempt to outsmart a territorial woodpecker who apparently believes his reflection is an enemy. Tim Taylor, owner of Thruway Auto Glass, said he replaced 30 smashed mirrors last year and 18 this year, all from cars of people who live in this area east of Syracuse. ‘People come in pretty mad. One guy’s been here three times already because he keeps forgetting to cover the mirrors,’ Taylor said. Anne Miller has had two mirrors on her Pontiac Grand Prix smashed and watched the bird attack her neighbor’s Malibu. ‘I told him to shoo,’ she said. ‘But instead of flying off, he walked across the windshield and did the passenger mirror. I was flabbergasted.’”

—The Post-Standard

*        *        *

AS THE WORM TURNS

Most Canadians are probably unaware of it, but according to scientists, there are virtually no native earthworms in Canada. There once were, but the last ice age, during which nearly all of Canada was covered by ice sheets and which ended approximately 14,000 years ago, wiped them out. They never recovered. When Europeans settled Canada, the soils of imported plants and the hooves of animals carried European earthworms, which, with no competition, soon took over the country’s soil.

More blonde hair dye is sold in Dallas, Texas, than any other U.S. city. (Insert blonde joke here.)

HAIR IN CANADA…

Hair’s the news from Canada. (Remember: you heard it hair first.)

M
ONSTER HAIR
Nine people from Teslin, Yukon Territory, reported seeing “a large hairy man” in July 2005. Chucka Choumant and Trent Smarch, two men who saw the creature, said it was more than nine feet tall and completely covered in hair. They believed it to be the legendary Sasquatch and pointed to some evidence it left behind: a tuft of reddish-brown hair they found in some branches. The hair was sent to a conservation officer in Whitehorse where, they hoped, DNA testing would determine just what the creature was. The results came back a few weeks later. It was bison hair.

PROTEST HAIR

Two Saskatchewan ranchers were upset when the United States banned Canadian cattle imports after the mad cow scare in 2003. Early in 2004, Jay Fitzpatrick and Miles Anderson decided to show their displeasure by refusing to cut their hair until the ban was lifted. They expected it to last only a few months, but a year later the ban was still on. The protest attracted national attention and caused some unforeseen problems: “I squeal like a little girl pulling that comb through my hair,” Fitzpatrick said. When the ban was rescinded in July 2005, the two men finally got haircuts. And they turned the barber visit into a charity event: dozens of locals turned up to watch their long locks get clipped—and raised more than $3,000 for the local curling rink.

FARM HAIR

In January 2005, Dr. Margaret Gruber, an agricultural researcher for the Canadian government, announced a new project: growing hairy canola plants. She hoped that they would help control flea beetles, which now cause an estimated $150 million in damage to Canadian canola crops annually. The beetles, she said, “don’t like hair to get in their way.” Canola naturally has small hairs, but the researchers are going to spend the next three years making them even hairier.

90% of all Canadians live within 100 miles of the U.S. border.

VIOLENT HAIR

In 2004 a 26-year-old Winnipeg man got his hair cut and dyed in a salon in a local mall. He didn’t like it. He returned the following day and demanded his money back. The store offered to recolor his hair, and the man accepted—but he didn’t like it that time, either. “There was nothing you could do to make him happy,” the colorist told the
Winnipeg Sun
. “First it was too ashy. Then it was too gold, then it wasn’t gold enough.” The man then threatened the salon employee, and security guards were called. Suddenly, a witness said, “It became like professional wrestling.” The man punched one of the guards in the face and kicked another, then proceeded to trash the store. Police finally subdued the man and charged him with assault, saying it was the city’s first known case of “hair rage.”

BODY HAIR

Every February people from all over Canada—and many from around the world—flock to the annual Yukon Sourdough Rendezvous in Whitehorse. The festival celebrates the rugged lifestyle of the people in the far, frozen north. One of the most popular events at the festival is the “Women’s Hairy Leg Contest.” Contestants compete in three different leg-hair categories: the densest hair, the longest hair, and the most horrific hair. The winners are chosen by a local barber. Their prize: each receives a gold-plated razor.

HILL HAIR

People who visit the town of Hairy Hill, Alberta, often ask how the town got its name. The answer can be found in the University of Alberta’s Folklore and History Collection (in a document entitled “How Hairy Hill Got Its Name”): When the first settlers arrived in the late 1800s, they were puzzled by one aspect of the place they’d chosen as the site of their new homes. “Everywhere they looked they saw large mats of hair covering the ground.” They didn’t figure it out until the next spring, when they saw hundreds of buffalo “roaming lazily along the slopes of the hill.” It turned out that the hill was a regular spring feeding ground for the bison—and every spring they shed their heavy winter coats. And that is how Hairy Hill got its name.

In a microwave, water molecules vibrate at the rate of 5 billion times per second.

FIRST-CLASS MAIL

Way back in the 20th century, people used to correspond through the real mail—using real paper and everything. Here are some hilarious old letters we recently found
.

To: A. J. Child and Son, Mail Order House
123 Washington Ave,
St. Louis, Missouri

Gentlemen:

Your advertisement states that you can furnish everything. My need is simple. I would ask you to rush by express one corpse. Make it as fresh as possible.

Respectfully yours,       

Dr. J. Dollison       

And the response
…

Dr. J.Dollison
Eugene, Oregon

Dear Dr. Dollison,

There are a number of our customers that we would like to annihilate and deliver to you in the form you have requested. Also, we have a useless employee that we have time and again asked to pick up papers under the elevator. If we are successful shall advise you further. In the mean time cannot fill your order for a corpse.

A. J. Child and Son
Mail Order House

During WWII, Disney created over 1,000 military insignias for the armed services.

Dr. J. J. Newman

New Orleans, La
.

Sir:

I am on to you and your kind. Yesterday my children had some dental work done on their teeth by you. Then you gave them some candy to eat. Candy makes more cavities as everyone knows. First you fill their cavities, then you fill my children full of candy to make more cavities to make more work for yourself. This could go on infinitely if I did not discover your scheme. I will not pay you for either the work done on James and Mary, nor for the candy you gave them
.

Not as ever,
Mrs. A. Kern

P.S. I am going to tell the whole neighborhood
.

From a Chinese clerk applying for a post in England…

Dear Sir,

I am Wang. It is for my personal benefit that I write for a position in your honourable house. I have a flexible brain. My education was impressed upon me in the Peking University. I can frive a type-writer with good noise and myh English is great. My references are of good and should you hope to see me they eill be read by you with great pleasure.

My last job has left itself from me for the good reason that the large man is dead.

It was on account of no fault of mine.

So honorable sirs what about it? It I can be of big use to you I Will arrive on some date that you should guess.

Yours faithfully,
WANG

In England, drunk driving became illegal in 1872.

Marshall Field Co.
State Street
Chicago, Ill.

Gentlemen:

Where do you get that stuff about “the customer is always right”? I think you are all wrong. Now if I am right about you being wrong, then the customer is not always right.

I am a customer of your store so (Let me quote from the classics) ib so facto, I am right by your own admission. Then if I am right, you are wrong, and if I am wrong, you are liars.

Go sit on a tack.

Yours truly,
B.Boone  

Copy to:

My Attorney

Mme. Ara Hats
88 E. 57th Street
New York, New York

Dear Mme:

I wear the front of my hat backwards because the front part back makes the back front more becominger. Is it a mistake?

Julia P
.

The world’s first known vending machine dispensed holy water. (Egypt, A.D. 100)

“I KNOW SOMEONE WHO LOOKS JUST LIKE YOU”

Uncle John has news for you: you may have a twin brother or sister that you know nothing about. Sound crazy? It sounded crazy to these folks, too…but it was true
.

J
ENNY FINDS MARGARET
Jenny Mitchell, 57, of Windsor, England, had always known she was adopted, but she knew nothing of her birth mother. In 1997 she decided to see what she could find out, so she sent away for a copy of her birth certificate. She noticed that the time of birth—4:00 p.m.—was written down next to the date of birth.

In some countries it’s common for the hospital to note the time of birth, but as Mitchell learned, in Great Britain they only note the time of birth when they need to distinguish between one multiple birth and another. “It took a while for the penny to drop,” she told England’s
Sunday Mirror
. “And then my head started reeling. I couldn’t believe it. I was a twin!”

In Great Britain adoption records are kept secret, so when Mitchell started looking for her sister she got nowhere…until she hired a detective who was an expert at tracking down long-lost relatives. He found Mitchell’s sister, Margaret Williams, living in Cardiff, Wales. Williams was stunned. Her first inkling that she had an identical twin was when the detective called her one morning in 1998. “I asked him to break the news to Margaret,” Mitchell says. “I was frightened she might not want to know me. But when we got talking it was as if we’d talked all our lives.”

BRENT AND GEORGE FIND EACH OTHER

In 1971 Laura Cain, a 20-year-old college sophomore, became pregnant by her boyfriend, Randy Holmes, and nine months later gave birth to fraternal twins. The stress of caring for twins was difficult for them, so they placed the babies in foster care while they put their lives in order. A few months later they got married, and went to the foster care agency and got their twin sons, George and Marcus, back. Or at least that’s what they thought, for 20 years, until September, 1991, when a kid named Brent Tremblay happened to enroll at Carleton University in Ottawa. One afternoon Brent was sitting in a student lounge when a girl walked up to him and said, “Hi, George!” When Brent told her his name wasn’t George, she gave him a funny look and walked off. A few days later it happened again; but this time the girl went and got her friend George—George Holmes—to show him the guy who looked like him. “It was like looking into a mirror,” George says. “It was incredible.”

The chemical process that turns bread into toast is called the Maillard reaction.

George and Brent looked alike, shared many of the same interests, and even had similar mannerisms. Their friends insisted that they had to be identical twins, but how could they be? Brent was adopted, and George lived with his biological parents. And he
already
had a twin brother—Marcus. Still, the resemblance was so uncanny that even they began to wonder.

In August 1993, all three boys and Laura Cain had their DNA tested. The results confirmed that George and Brent are, indeed, identical twins, and that Laura Cain is their birth mother. (Laura is certain the doctor who delivered them told her they were
fraternal
twins, which is why she wasn’t troubled by the fact that George and Marcus didn’t look alike.)

So who is Marcus really? An investigation revealed that Brent and George were placed in the same foster home with a third newborn—Marcus—who’d been born to a different mother five days earlier. When Laura and Randy went to get their twins back, the foster home accidentally gave them the wrong kid. Marcus went home with George; Brent was left behind at the foster home and was later put up for adoption. How could such a mixup happen? Ottawa’s Children’s Aid Society looked into the matter, but after 20 years they were unable to come up with anything. By then the woman who ran the foster home was in her 80s and suffering from Alzheimer’s. They’ll never know how it happened.