Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader (58 page)

LINDA FINDS IAN

Linda Sloan knew she was adopted: she lived in a children’s home until she was adopted by a family in Clackmannanshire, Scotland. But that’s
all
she knew—and probably would have been all she’d ever know, had she not bumped into one of her adoptive mother’s relatives while vacationing in Spain in 1997. That relative put her in touch with another family member who had worked in the children’s home where Linda spent her early years. And that family member remembered that Linda had a twin brother.

Sleep on this: Mattresses, pillows, and bedding cause 500,000 accidents in the U.S. each year.

Linda spent the next two years searching for her brother, and came up with nothing. Finally in 1999, she contacted the “Helpline” column of her local newspaper, the
Scottish Daily Record
, and asked for their assistance. After two years of searching on her own, how long did it take the paper to find her brother? Two days. Then the telephone rang and “a voice asked if I was the L. Sloan in the
Daily Record
,” Linda recounted. “I said I was, and he said, ‘Well, I’m your brother.’”

The caller—Ian McLuckie—filled Linda in on their life story. He’d been raised by their birth mother, who had given birth to twins following a wartime affair with an American G.I. Two kids turned out to be too much for the single mom, so she put Linda up for adoption and kept Ian. She never gave Ian even a hint that he had a twin sister out there somewhere. “I can’t get my head round the fact that after 54 years, I have a sister,” Ian says. “It has all been so amazing.”

WENDY FINDS JOHN

When she was a kid growing up in the town of Cheltenham, England, Wendy Brooks, 62, had no idea that she was adopted, let alone a twin. Then, when she was about 10 years old, her cousin blurted it out during an argument. She immediately confronted her adopted mother, Annie Finch, who admitted the truth and told Wendy how she’d been adopted. Ten years earlier, Finch explained, she had caught a woman abandoning a twin boy and girl on her doorstep. Finch could only afford to take one child, and she wanted a girl, so she took Wendy. The birth mother left with her son, and Finch never learned what happened to them.

Wendy married an American when she was 15 and moved to Oklahoma two years later. She thought about her brother all the time, but it wasn’t until she was in her mid-50s that she became obsessed with tracking him down. The search dragged on for six long years. Finally, in 2001 she tracked down John Bennett, a poultry farmer living in Suffolk, England, and told him she was his twin. Bennett, who had been raised in an orphanage, knew nothing of his birth mother and was relieved to finally know something about his past. “I haven’t come off the ceiling since it started,” he told England’s
Guardian
newspaper. “I didn’t know I had a twin, though I always had a feeling that
something
was out there.”

Coca-Cola was forced out of India in 1977 for refusing to disclose their secret formula.

THE ROSEENS FIND BRYANNA

In 2001 Randy and Jane Roseen were in the process of adopting an orphaned baby girl from the People’s Republic of China. They sent a care package to the foster home, and with it they included a small disposable camera. When Randy flew to China to get the girl, whom they named Cyanna, the camera was included with her belongings from the foster home.

When the Roseens had the film in the camera developed, a few photos showed Cyanna lying in her crib with another baby that looked just like her. The babies weren’t officially listed as twins in the foster home’s records because they’d been found separately—Cyanna had been abandoned at a hospital, and the other baby had been found on the doorstep of a government building. But they looked so much alike that the foster home assumed they were twins and put them together in the same crib. Had they been officially recognized as twins, Chinese adoption policy would have required that the two girls be adopted together. But they weren’t, so they were split up.

The Roseens decided to adopt the second child. Officials at China’s Center of Adoption Affairs were skeptical that the babies were really twins, but when they saw the photographs the resemblance was so striking that they ordered DNA tests. The tests confirmed that the girls were a genetic match. And not a moment too soon: the other girl was about to be adopted by another family. Months of paperwork and red tape followed, but by April 2002 everything was in order and the second baby, whom they named Bryanna, was delivered into their arms. “It’s like a thousand miracles,” Randy says. “Every time something went wrong, someone would step in.”

*        *        *

“Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of resurrection.”

—Arthur Schopenhauer

In 1965 a U.S. Navy bomber accidentally dropped a “practice” bomb on a store in Florida.

BAD GRANNY

Why, Grandma, what big teeth you’ve got!

G
RANNY’S GOT A GUN
“A bored granny has been given a suspended prison sentence after staging a fake bank robbery as a practical joke. The 80-year-old, identified only as ‘Elfriede,’ threatened a cashier at a bank in Austria with a toy pistol and hissed, ‘This is a stickup.’ Then she started to laugh. ‘My heart stopped for a second,’ the terrified bank employee said later. ‘But when she started laughing, I realized that it was just a joke.’

“When the pensioner told the court that she’d done it ‘for a laugh,’ the judge warned her that she wouldn’t be let off so lightly if she does it again within the next three years.

“Elfriede replied, ‘If I live that long. But thanks.’”

—Ananova

BLACK MARKET BABA

“Russian police have arrested a gun-smuggling granny who kept mobsters supplied with everything from artillery to assault rifles.

“The newspaper
Komsomolskaya Pravda
said Tuesday that ‘Baba Nina’ (Grandma Nina) and her eight-person gang had been bringing in weapons from the Baltics for more than a year. The report described the woman as a Robin Hoodish figure who supported a large number of relatives and a handicapped son while she and her husband lived in a modest apartment with only a black-and-white TV. But it added that the pensioner ran her gang with ‘an iron hand’ and knew most of the mobsters in the region.

“Disguising herself as one of the millions of ‘shuttle traders’—small-time entrepreneurs who buy goods cheap abroad, then sell them at a profit back home—Baba Nina flew to Lithuania twice a month, returning with black-market weapons hidden in her bags among cheap T-shirts and trousers. On the telephone, she spoke in code to gang members, calling machine guns ‘big trousers’ and handguns ‘small trousers.’ The newspaper said she is now in jail, but has settled in nicely. ‘Other prisoners pay her respect.’”

—Associated Press

In the weightlessness of space, an astronaut’s heart actually shrinks.

GANJA GRANNY

“Meet Molly Williams. The 78-year-old West Virginia woman may have the distinction of being America’s oldest pot dealer. She was nabbed last week on felony drug charges after state police investigators executed a search warrant on the woman’s home and discovered two pounds of marijuana (divided for distribution in plastic baggies) stashed in a grocery bag at the ‘bottom of a deep freeze.’ Williams’s boyfriend, 72-year-old Jack White, told cops that the pot was his old lady’s. She now faces 15 years in prison.”

—The Smoking Gun

ORGAN-IZED CRIME

“The boy thought his grandmother was taking him to Disneyland, but Russian police say she had other plans: to sell her grandson so his organs could be used for transplants. Police in Ryazan, 125 miles southeast of Moscow, said Saturday that they arrested a woman after they were tipped that she was trying to sell her grandson to a man who was going to take him to the West. There his organs were to be removed and sold, a Ryazan police officer said. After a surveillance operation, police moved in to arrest the woman, who was being aided in the scheme by the boy’s uncle. They expected to get about $70,000. When asked how he could sell his nephew, the uncle replied: ‘My mother said that it is none of my business, he is her grandson.’”

—Washington Post

GRANDMADAM

“Lindenwold, New Jersey, police made a surprising discovery when they busted the alleged madam of a prostitution ring. The woman running the show was an 80-year-old grandmother.

“Authorities arrested Vera Tursi last month during a sting operation to crack down on prostitution rings posing as legal escort services. Tursi admitted her role in the business, saying she took it over a few years ago from her daughter, who had died. Tursi said she needed money to subsidize her Social Security checks.

“Undercover police first began to wonder about the age of their suspect when they called the escort service as part of their sting operation. They said she seemed to have difficulty breathing.”

—CNN

World’s largest active volcano: Mauna Loa, Hawaii.

APOUJRAD

A
nother
P
age
o
f
U
ncle
J
ohn’s
R
andom
A
cronym
D
efinitions
.

ISBN: I
nternational
S
tandard
B
ook
N
umber. Every published book has a unique 10-or 13-digit number to identify it to librarians and book sellers. (It’s listed on the bar code.)

NASCAR: N
ational
A
ssociation for
S
tock
Ca
r
A
uto
R
acing.

SRO:
If all the seats at a play or concert are sold out, the venue might let you stand in the back of the hall. That’s called
S
tanding
R
oom
O
nly.

Gestapo:
Germany’s state police in World War II, it’s an abbreviation of
Ge
heime
Sta
ats
po
lizei
, which means “secret state police.”

XXX and OOO:
Added at the end of a letter, the Xs symbolize kisses; the Os mean hugs. It probably originated in the Middle Ages, when illiterate people would sign an X for their name and then kiss the paper as a sign of good faith.

A.M. and P.M.:
A
nte
M
eridiem
, Latin for “before midday.” P.M. means
P
ost
M
eridiem
, or “after midday.”

B.C.: B
efore
C
hrist. Describes years before the modern era of history. B.C. has fallen out of favor in academic circles and has been replaced by the politically correct
B.C.E
., or
“B
efore
C
ommon
E
ra.”

A.D.:
A
nno
D
omini
, Latin for “in the year of our Lord,” used to denote time after the life of Christ. The politically correct term now used is
C.E
., or
“C
ommon
E
ra.”

MiG:
The name of the Cold War–era Soviet fighter jet is short for
Mi
koyan
-G
urevich, the name of the manufacturer.

C-SPAN:
It stands for
C
able
S
atellite
P
ublic
A
ffairs
N
etwork. (C-SPAN broadcasts mostly Congress and Senate sessions.)

VIN: V
ehicle
I
dentification
N
umber. It’s a 17-digit code used to identify cars.

3M:
The consumer goods company (they make Post-Its and Scotch-Guard) used to be called
M
innesota
M
ining and
M
anufacturing Company—three Ms became 3M.

Number-one reason Americans visit the emergency room: Stomach pain.

LEMONS

Just about everyone has owned an unreliable car. Uncle John’s was a 1979 Triumph Spitfire that caught fire one time when he drove it home from the mechanic. But that piece of junk was nothing compared to these losers
.

T
HE STUTZ BLACKHAWK (1972–87)
From 1911 through the early 1930s, the Stutz Motor Car company was one of the most exclusive automakers in the United States, but by 1935 it was bankrupt. In the late 1960s, an investment banker named James O’Donnell resurrected the Blackhawk name and began converting Pontiac Grand Prixs into ultra-luxury two-door coupes. It had running boards, fake chrome exhaust pipes along both sides of the car, and a spare tire sunk into the trunk lid. Leather luggage that matched the leather seats came standard; mink carpets and a mink-lined trunk were optional. The company also offered to build limousines, convertibles, and four-door sedans based on the same design. The Blackhawk debuted at $23,000 in 1972 and nearly doubled in price to $43,000 for 1973, when the average new car cost about $5,000.
Fatal Flaw:
The Blackhawk looked like a pimp-mobile designed by Liberace and was probably the ugliest ultra-luxury car ever made. Besides, how many people were dumb enough to pay Rolls Royce prices for a Pontiac Grand Prix, even if the trunk was lined with mink? Elvis Presley was: he bought the first production model (and later bought four more). Evel Knievel bought a Blackhawk; so did Robert Goulet, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr. With its goofy looks and customers like these, the Blackhawk was doomed to be ridiculed as a plaything of celebrities with more money than taste. Still, O’Donnell managed to build more than 500 cars before finally going out of business in 1987.