Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader (19 page)

I thought it was a mushroom when

I found it in the woods forsaken;

But since I sleep beneath this mound,

I must have been mistaken.

In Northumberland, England:

Matthew

Hollingshead

Here lieth Matthew Hollingshead,

Who died from cold caught in his head.

It brought on fever and rheumatiz,

Which ended me—for here I is.

In Boston, Mass.

Owen Moore

Owen Moore:

Gone away

Owin’ more

Than he could pay.

In Tombstone, Ariz.

John Timothy Snow

Here lies John Timothy Snow, who died fighting for a lady’s honor. (She wanted to keep it)

In Wolverhampton, England:

Joseph Jones

Here lies the bones

Of Joseph Jones

Who ate whilst he was able

But, once o’er fed

He dropt down dead and fell beneath the table.

When from the tomb

To meet his doom,

He rises amidst sinners;

Since he must dwell in Heav’n or Hell

Take him—which gives best dinners.

Ever wonder how the creators of your favorite comic strips came up with the idea? Uncle John got curious and did some research. Here are a few of the stories he found.

T
HE FAR SIDE

Background:
In 1976, jazz guitarist Gary Larson was on the verge of getting a dream gig with a big band in Seattle...but they hired somebody else. Crushed with disappointment, Larson spent the weekend drawing animal cartoons (something the “frustrated biologist,” as he called himself, had done since he was a kid). On Monday, he took his drawings to a small California wilderness magazine to sell, and to his surprise, the magazine bought them all.

A Strip Is Born:
Meanwhile, he kept drawing. To pay the rent, he took a job as an animal cruelty investigator with the Seattle Humane Society. (In true “Far Side” fashion, he ran over a dog on the way to the interview.) One day, while Larson was on assignment, a reporter for the
Seattle Times
noticed the drawings in his notebook. She asked if she could show them to her editor...who hired Larson to do a cartoon called “Nature’s Way.” Unfortunately, it ran right next to the children’s crossword puzzle. Parents complained about its warped humor, and it was cancelled.

Luckily, Larson had just shown his cartoons to an editor at the
San Francisco Chronicle.
The editor immediately bought the strip. The only thing he changed was the name. “Nature’s Way” became “The Far Side.”

DILBERT

Background:
Scott Adams’ career as an artist didn’t look promising. He got the lowest grade in a drawing class at college, and had cartoons rejected by
Playboy
,
The New Yorker
and a long list of comic strip syndicators. He was stuck in cublicle-land, working first at the Crocker National Bank for eight years, then at Pacific Bell for nine.

A Strip Is Born:
In the late 1980s, while he was still at Pac Bell, he decided he wanted to earn a living as a cartoonist. He invented
“Dilbert” and sent samples to six comic strip syndicates. Four rejected him, one suggested he take drawing lessons, and one—United Features—offered him a contract. But since “Dilbert” wasn’t a hit yet, Adams kept his day-job.

The turning point came in 1993. “I asked the syndicate for ideas on what they would like me to write more about,” Adams recalls. “They said, ‘Do more on downsizing, more on things getting harder in the workplace.’” To find out what people were thinking in cubicles around America, Adams began posting his e-mail address in every strip. The feedback he got helped him make “Dilbert” the first comic strip to capture the frustrations of modern office workers. In 1995, he was finally able to leave Pac Bell and become a fulltime cartoonist. Today, “Dilbert” is in over 1,000 newspapers; about 20% of his story ideas still come from readers.

CALVIN & HOBBES

Background:
Bill Watterson graduated from college in 1979, and immediately got a job as a political cartoonist for the Cincinnati, Ohio Post. He was fired after six months. So in 1980, he tried a new career—as a comic strip artist. His first effort was called “Spaceman Spiff,” about a character who “wore flying goggles, smoked a cigar, and explored space in a dirigible.” It was rejected by every syndicate.

A Strip Is Born:
Five years and several flops later, he finally got someone interested in his work. The United Features Syndicate picked out two minor characters in a strip he’d submitted—the lead character’s little brother and a stuffed tiger who came to life—and paid Watterson to develop a strip about them. He called them Calvin (after theologian John Calvin) and Hobbes (after the pessimistic philosopher Thomas Hobbes). United Features actually rejected the finished product, so Watterson took it to Universal Press Syndicate. They liked it. “Calvin and Hobbes” debuted on November 18, 1985, and didn’t bow out until ten years later, at the end of 1995. At that time it was America’s most popular strip, appearing in 2,400 newspapers.

“There is no deodorant like success.”
—Elizabeth Taylor

Here’s this edition’s installment of the BRI’s cheesy tabloid section—a bunch of gossip about famous people.

S
EAN CONNERY

Believes in reincarnation. According to one report, he’s convinced that in a past life, he was “an alcoholic railroad builder in Africa who lived with two native women, both of whom bore him sons, and who died of alcohol poisoning.”

CHARLES LINDBERGH

• When Lindbergh took his first flying lesson, he learned two things: (1) how to fly, and (2) that he was afraid of heights.

• To cure himself of vertigo, he first tried “wing walking” (climbing on the wings of a biplane while it was in flight), which didn’t work, and then parachute jumping, which did.

• “When Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic,” Jack Mingo writes in
The Juicy Parts
, “he didn’t carry a radio because it added too much weight. His navigation was an iffy thing. At one point near the end of his journey he spotted a fishing fleet, dove his plane down to within shouting distance, cut the engines, and screamed, ‘Which way to Ireland?’”

PABLO PICASSO

Picasso wasn’t breathing when he was born, and his face was so blue that the midwife left him for dead. An uncle revived him by blowing cigar smoke up his nose.

DONALD TRUMP

• In his book
Trump: The Art of the Comeback
, Trump confesses to being a “clean-hands freak” who washes his hands whenever he can and who hates shaking hands with strangers, especially when the stranger has just come from the restroom, “perhaps not even having washed his hands.”

• One year Trump visited the Bronx’s Public School 70 (located in a
poor neighborhood) for the school’s annual Principal for a Day event. On his way out, Trump dropped a $1 million bill in the bake sale cash box. (It was fake, of course—Trump’s idea of a joke.)

WILLIAM SHATNER

Swears he’s seen a UFO. “You’d almost think he was joking,” writes Tim Harrower in the Portland
Oregonian
, “but, no, Shatner was serious when he reported that a silver spacecraft flew over him in the Mojave Desert as he pushed his inoperative motorcycle. He also claims to have received a telepathic message from the beings in the craft advising him which direction to walk.”

PRESIDENT LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON

• “It was well known,” biographer Robert Dallek writes in
Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times
, “that he had ongoing affairs with a secretary, a beautiful Hispanic woman people called the ‘chili queen,’ and a woman at his ranch dubbed the ‘dairy queen’....When the wife of television newscaster David Brinkley accepted an invitation to visit Lyndon and Lady Bird at the ranch on a weekend her husband couldn’t be there, Johnson tried unsuccessfully to get her into bed.”

• Johnson could be extremely abusive to his aides, even the Secret Service officers sworn to defend him with their lives. Once, while driving across a field at the LBJ Ranch in Texas, Johnson stopped to relieve himself. “One of the Secret Service men standing near him ‘felt warm water on his leg,’” Dallek writes. “He looked down and said, ‘Mr. President, you are urinating on me.’ And Johnson’s response was, ‘I know I am...it’s my prerogative.’”

HENRY FORD

• One of his closest friends was Thomas Edison, and he was with the inventor when Edison died. At the moment of death, Ford captured Edison’s last breath in a bottle. It was one of his most prized possessions.

• Once while fiddling with a microscope, Ford had a close-up look at some granulated sugar crystals...and was horrified by their sharp points. He swore off of sugar for the rest of his life, fearing it would slice up his internal organs.

You never know what’s going to happen, right? Like, you might get stuck on that seat, have to call 911, and wind up in the next edition of the
Bathroom Reader....
Or you might find you’ve got one of these conditions. Don’t laugh
—it
could happen to YOU!

T
HE STENDHAL SYNDROME

Diagnosed In:
Florence, Italy, 1982

Medical Report:
“Some visitors to Florence panic before a Raphael masterpiece. Others collapse at the feet of Michelangelo’s statute of David,” reports the Reuters News Service. “At least once a month on average, a foreign tourist is rushed to the psychiatric ward of Florence’s Santa Maria Nuova Hospital suffering from acute mental imbalance, seemingly brought on by an encounter with the city’s art treasures.

“Psychiatrists call it the Stendhal Syndrome, after the French writer who recorded a similar emotional experience on his first visit to the city in 1817. After viewing some of the city’s famous art, he wrote: ‘I felt a pulsating in my heart. Life was draining out of me, while I walked fearing a fall.’

“More than half the patients are tourists from European countries. Italians, on the other hand, seem to be immune to the condition, along with the Japanese, who are apparently so organized in their sight-seeing that they rarely have time for emotional attacks.”

MUSCLE DYSMORPHIA SYNDROME

Diagnosed In:
The United States, 1997

Medical Report:
According to the
New York Times:
“Some bodybuilders appear to be suffering from an emotional disorder that is, in effect, the opposite of anorexia. Despite their muscular bodies and being in tiptop shape, they are convinced that they look puny.

“Their preoccupation with their bodies can become so intense that they give up desirable jobs, careers and social engagements so they can spend many hours a day at the gym bulking up. Some often refuse
to be seen in a bathing suit out of fear that others will regard their bodies as too small and out of shape.

“The first description of the disorder, called
muscle dysmorphia
, appeared in an issue of the journal
Psychosomatics
.”

KORO

Diagnosed In:
Indonesia

Medical Report:
According to
Fenton & Fowler’s Best, Worst and Most Unusual:
“Indonesian men occasionally fall prey to an obsessive fear that their penis is withdrawing into the body and that, if they do not take the matter into their own hands, so to speak, the process will ultimately kill them. The prescribed treatment is to grasp the disappearing organ and hold on for dear life until it stops receding.

“Since a typical bout of the malady, called
koro
, can last for hours or even days, the embarrassed victim must often ask friends, wife, witch doctor, and others to spell him in holding onto the vanishing member while he rests. He may also use a small, specially-designed, notched box. The disease is purely psychological, of course, but the ‘treatment’ frequently leaves victims exhausted, temporarily impotent, and black and blue about the privates.”

THE JERUSALEM SYNDROME

Diagnosed In:
Jerusalem, Israel, 1994

Medical Report:
According to the Associated Press: “A new condition is affecting visitors to the holy city of Jerusalem. Upon arriving there, people become convinced they are biblical figures reborn—including Moses, Jesus and Abraham.