Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (18 page)

Acting on information that Jones had been buried in a lead casket, Porter hired a digging party to tunnel under the neighborhood
and search for a lead casket among the hundreds of rotting and exposed wooden caskets. They found three lead coffins—and Jones was in the third. His body was so well preserved that it was identified by comparing the face to military medals inscribed with Jones’s likeness. An American Naval Squadron returned him to the U.S. Naval Academy in July 1905…where the body was stored under a staircase in a dormitory for seven more years until Congress finally appropriated enough money to build a permanent crypt.

JESSE JAMES

Claim to Fame:
Wild West bank and train robber

How He Died:
Shot by one of his gang members on April 3,1882

After the Funeral:
In the years after his death, several men came forward claiming to be the “real” Jesse James, arguing that the person in the grave was someone else. In September 1995, the remains were exhumed and their DNA was compared with James’s living descendants. Result: It was him.

ZACHARY TAYLOR

Claim to Fame:
12th president of the United States

How He Died:
On July 4, 1850, Taylor ate a bowl of fresh cherries and iced milk. Hours later, he complained of stomach pains and diarrhea; on July 9 he died.

Historians have always assumed Taylor died of natural causes; but rumors that he was poisoned with arsenic have persisted since his death. Taylor opposed the extension of slavery into newly admitted states; conspiracy theorists speculated he was murdered by pro-slavery forces.

After the Funeral:
In 1995, Taylor’s heirs consented to an exhumation to settle the controversy once and for all. Result: The tests were negative. “President Taylor had in his remains only minuscule levels of arsenic—consistent with any person who lived in the 19th century,” forensic anthropologist Dr. William Maples writes in
Dead Men Do Tell Tales.
“The possibility that another poison was used to kill Taylor is extremely remote….On the face of this evidence, the verdict of history must be that Zachary Taylor died of natural causes.”

Wit and wisdom from Oscar Wilde, one of the most popular—and controversial—writers of the 19th century.

“When people agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong.”

“I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do the day after.”

“I sometimes think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated His ability.”

“As long as woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly happy.”

“Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.”

“After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.”

“I like men who have a future, and women with a past.”

“Women give to men the very gold of their lives, but they invariably want it back in small change.”

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

“The Americans are certainly great hero-worshipers, and always take their heroes from the criminal classes.”

“No great artist sees things as they really are. If he did he would cease to be an artist.”

“In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants and the other is getting it.”

“Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.”

“A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone’s feelings unintentionally.”

“The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”

“The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.”

You won’t find trivia like this in any
ordinary
book.

T
HE NAME

The word
fart
comes from the Old English term
foertan
to explode.
Foertan
is also the origin of the word
petard
, an early type of bomb.
Petard
, in turn, is the origin of a more obscure term for fart—
ped,
or
pet
, which was once used by military men. (In Shakespeare’s
Henry IV
, there’s a character whose name means fart—Peto.)

WHY DO YOU FART?

Flatulence has many causes—for example, swallowing air as you eat and lactose intolerance. (Lactose is a sugar molecule in milk, and many people lack the enzyme needed to digest it.) But the most common cause is food that ferments in the gastrointestinal tract.

• A simple explanation: The fats, proteins, and carbohydrates you eat become a “gastric soup” in your stomach. This soup then passes into the small intestine, where much of it is absorbed through the intestinal walls into the bloodstream to feed the body.

• But the small intestine can’t absorb everything, especially complex carbohydrates. Some complex carbohydrates—the ones made up of several sugar molecules (beans, some milk products, fiber, etc.) can’t be broken down. So they’re simply passed along to the colon, where bacteria living in your intestine feed off the fermenting brew. If that sounds gross, try this: the bacteria then excrete gases into your colon. Farting is how your colon rids itself of the pressure the gas creates.

FRUIT OF THE VINE

So why not just quit eating complex carbohydrates?

• First, complex carbohydrates—which include fruit, vegetables, and whole grains—are crucial for a healthy diet. “Put it this way,” explains Jeff Rank, an associate professor of gastroenterology at the University of Minnesota. “Cabbage and beans are bad for gas, but they are good for you.”

• Second, they’re not the culprits when it comes to the least desirable aspect of farting: smell.

• Farts are about 99% odorless gases—hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, oxygen, and methane (it’s the methane that makes farts flammable). So why the odor? Blame it on those millions of bacteria living in your colon. Their waste gases usually contain sulfur molecules—which smell like rotten eggs. This is the remaining 1% that clears rooms in a hurry.

AM I NORMAL?

• Johnson & Johnson, which produces drugs for gas and indigestion, once conducted a survey and found that almost one-third of Americans believe they have a flatulence problem.

• However, according to Terry Bolin and Rosemary Stanton, authors of
Wind Breaks: Coming to Terms with Flatulence
, doctors say most flatulence is healthy. What’s unhealthy is worrying about it so much.

NOTABLE FARTERS

• Le Petomane, a 19th-century music hall performer, had the singular ability to control his farts. He could play tunes, as well as imitate animal and machinery sounds rectally. Le Petomane’s popularity briefly rivalled that of Sarah Bernhardt.

• A computer factory in England, built on the site of a 19th-century chapel, is reportedly inhabited by a farting ghost. Workers think it might be the embarrassed spirit of a girl who farted while singing in church. “On several occasions,” said an employee, “there has been a faint girlish voice singing faint hymns, followed by a loud raspberry sound and then a deathly hush.”

• Joseph Stalin was afraid of farting in public. He kept glasses and a water pitcher on his desk so that if he felt a wind coming on, he could mask the sound by clinking the glasses while pouring water.

• Martin Luther believed, “on the basis of personal experience, that farts could scare off Satan himself.”

A few interesting odds and ends from under the sink and in the medicine cabinet.

A
UTOMATIC TOILET BOWL CLEANER
. A guy named Eisen cleaned the toilets in his house because his wife wouldn’t—but he hated it. One day in 1977, while hanging out at a swimming pool, he started thinking that if chlorine keeps pools sanitary, it could do the same for his toilets—and then he wouldn’t have to scrub them. But how to keep the bowl water chlorinated? Later at dinner, Eisen was inspired by the sour cream on his baked potato: he figured that if he put chlorine in a sour cream container, punched holes in it, and put it in his toilet tank, it would get a dose of chlorine every time it was flushed. It worked. He turned it into a product called 2000 Flushes, now the best selling toilet cleaner in America.

BRECK SHAMPOO
. In 1898, at age 21, John Breck became America’s youngest fire chief. It didn’t make him happy, though—he was obsessed with the fact that he was going bald. He decided to take chemistry classes at a nearby college to see if he could save his hair. There, he hit on a solution: liquid shampoo. (At the time, Americans used bar soap on their hair—shampoos were used only in Europe). The shampoo he developed didn’t save his hair, but in 1908 it did become the inspiration for America’s first shampoo company.

DRAMAMINE
. In 1949, a woman with a bad case of hives went to the Johns Hopkins Allergy Clinic in Baltimore. Her doctor gave her a prescription for a new drug he thought was an antihistimine. On her next visit, the woman’s hives were just as bad…but she was in good spirits. For once, she said, the motion of the streetcar she took to get there hadn’t made her sick. The doctor suspected the drug had something to do with it. So he gave her a placebo to see if she’d get motion sickness again. She did. He gave her the drug again—the motion sickness vanished. The clinic got the army to try it on soldiers “making a rough trans-Atlantic crossing via ship.” Worked fine. The drug—Dramamine—became the standard treatment for motion sickness.

We all know the first president (Washington), the first president to serve more than two terms (FDR), and so on. But who was the first to be cloned? For that info, you need to turn to the
Bathroom Reader.

T
he president:
Gerald Ford

Notable first:
First president to be a fashion model.

In the late 1930s, he was a student at Yale Law School. His girlfriend, a model, convinced him to put $1,000 into a modeling agency. His reward: He got to pose in skiwear ads with her.

The president:
Richard Nixon

Notable first:
First president to host a rock concert at the White House. Unlikely as it seems, Nixon invited the Guess Who and the Turtles to Washington to play for his daughters.

The president:
Abraham Lincoln

Notable first:
First president to be cloned.

Someday this may be big news. Now it’s just a curiosity. In 1990 a group of research scientists got permission to duplicate the DNA from Lincoln’s hair, blood, and skull (which they got from the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C.), to find out whether he had a disease called Marfan’s syndrome.

The president:
John Quincy Adams

Notable first:
First president with a pet reptile.

Adams kept a pet alligator in the East Room of the White House. Historians say he enjoyed “the spectacle of guests fleeing from the room in terror.”

The president:
George Washington

Notable first:
First president to use “help wanted” ads to hire staff. Washington moved to New York—the U.S. capital—in 1789 and put a classified ad in the
New York Daily Gazette
requesting a coachman and a cook “for the Family of a President.” Apparently it was no great honor to work for a First Family—the ads ran for six weeks before the jobs were filled.

If you weren’t reading right now, you might be listening to a “personal tape player”—like a Walkman. But then when people started banging on the door, asking what you were doing in there, you wouldn’t hear them. Maybe they’d panic and think you were dead, like Elvis. They’d run outside and get a bunch of people to help break down the door. Wham! And there you’d be, completely oblivious. They’d get so mad that they’d attack you with the toilet plunger, which would get stuck to the top of your head. You’d have to go to the emergency room…and…well, aren’t you glad you’re reading
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader
instead? Since it’s not safe to
listen
to a Walkman, we’ll print a story about it instead. It’s by Jack Mingo.

T
HE PRESSMAN