Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (48 page)

Q:
Name six animals which specifically live in the Arctic.

A:
2 polar bears and 3 4 seals

Q:
What was Sir Walter Raleigh famous for?

A:
He invented cigarettes and started a craze for bicycles.

Q:
Briefly explain why breathing is important.

A:
When you breathe, you inspire. When you do not breathe, you expire.

Q:
What is a fossil?

A:
A fossil is an extinct animal. The older it is, the more extinct it is.

Q:
Explain why phosphorous trichloride (PCl
₃
) is polar.

A:
God made it that way.

Q:
Name the wife of Orpheus, whom he attempted to save from the underworld.

A:
Mrs. Orpheus

Q:
Name one measure that can be put into place to avoid river flooding in times of extensive rainfall.

A:
Flooding may be avoided by placing a number of dames into the river.

Q:
Why do mushrooms have their distinctive shapes?

A:
Mushrooms always grow in damp places and so they look like umbrellas.

Q:
Name one of the Romans’

greatest achievements.

A:
Learning to speak Latin.

Q:
Expand (a+b)
ⁿ

A:
(a+b)
ⁿ

Q:
Where was the Declaration of Independence signed?

A:
At the bottom.

POOP THAT’S ART

Some artists are known for creating magnificent masterpieces like
David
(Michelangelo), the
Mona Lisa
(Da Vinci), or
The Starry Night (Van
Gogh). Others are known for, well, taking a more “earthy” approach to art. Like Italian artist Pietro Manzoni, for example
.

T
HE OUTSIDER
Piero Manzoni (1933–63) decided early on that he wanted to be an artist, but was pressured by his parents to be more practical and become a lawyer instead. He tried studying law but soon washed out, and he didn’t fare much better when he switched to philosophy and literature. Finally, in 1955, the 22-year-old returned to his first love and began creating art full-time.

Manzoni’s early landscape paintings were fairly conventional, but his work didn’t stay that way for long. Perhaps it was because he felt alienated from his controlling parents, or because he’d been born into a family of aristocrats and was used to seeing himself as superior to other people. Or maybe it was because he was largely self-taught. Whatever the case, Manzoni never identified with the European art establishment. He saw himself as an outsider, forgoing paints, plaster, and other traditional art materials in favor of things like bread rolls, petroleum, rabbit fur, and cotton balls. He used them to create art that purists did not consider art at all.

In 1959, for example, he exhibited a series of inflated balloons attached to bases inscribed with the words “Piero Manzoni—Artist’s Breath” in Italian. The following year, in a show titled “Consumption of Dynamic Art by the Art-Devouring Public,” he decorated hard-boiled eggs with his thumbprint, then fed them to the people who came to the show.

CAN–DOO ATTITUDE

Manzoni’s most famous work of art was
Merde d’Artiste
(“Artist’s Sh*t”), a series of 90 cans that he filled with his own excrement, then numbered, signed, and labeled with the words “ARTIST’S SH*T, CONTENT 30 GR., FRESHLY PRESERVED, PRODUCED AND TINNED IN MAY 1961” in Italian, English, French, and German. Manzoni pegged the price of his poop to the value of gold at the time, about $34 a can.

Why are doctors called “quacks”? It comes from “quacksalver,” meaning salve salesman.

FOOL’S GOLD

Manzoni apparently intended
Merde d’Artiste
as a commentary on the foolishness of the art-buying public, which valued even the excrement of an artist more than gold.

If you were one of the people “foolish” enough to trade gold for poop when the
Merde d’Artiste
cans went on sale in the summer of 1961, you’re probably a happy fool today. Why? Because Manzoni never issued a second series of cans, and he dropped dead from a heart attack in his Milan studio when he was only 29. The value of the remaining cans (he only made 90 of them) has been rising faster than the price of gold for nearly 50 years.

When the Tate Gallery, home to the Great Britain’s collection of modern art, plopped down £22,300 (about $33,000) of taxpayer money to buy can #4 in 2000, many art critics (not to mention taxpayers) howled. “Why is the art world so much more absurdly gullible than, say, the world of books, or the world of music?” the London
Daily Telegraph
complained. “No concert hall would ever think of forking out £22,300 for an ‘incredibly important international composer’ to defecate live on stage.”

FOOL’S POOP

Ever since the
Merde d’Artiste
cans first went on sale on 1961, a lot of people have wondered if they really do contain Manzoni’s excrement as advertised, or were filled with some other substance. None of the cans has ever been opened by its owner—that would destroy the art and rob the can of most of its monetary value. All anyone could do was guess what the contents really were…until one of Manzoni’s collaborators, Agostino Bonalumi, admitted in 2007 that the cans actually contained…plaster.

So did the revelation that the poop cans contain no poop hurt their value? Not at all—if anything, the publicity made them even more valuable: In 2007 can #19 sold at auction for $80,000.

Biggest balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade: a 100-foot-long Superman (1939).

OTHER POOP ARTISTS OF NOTE

•
Robert Wyndam Bucknell
(Miami). In his 2004 show “Why I Am So F***ing Special: It’s All About Me,” the 27-year-old Bucknell parodied Manzoni’s work by displaying in glass jars the stool samples of a realtor, a pharmacist, and an art gallery owner alongside a jar of what he said was his own excrement. (His jar actually contained purple toy dinosaurs.) The jars were displayed beneath a sign paraphrasing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby:
“Let me tell you about the very talented: they are different than you and I.”

•
Buster Simpson
(Seattle). “Among many other projects, Simpson offered a recycling solution to waste in the urban core: portable potties on the edges of sidewalks, with wastes falling into pre-dug and prepared holes,” Regina Hackett wrote about the environmental artist in the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
in 2008. “When enough fertilizer falls in, the potty moves on and a tree takes its place.” Simpson’s goal: raise awareness of environmental issues without “spoon-feeding the manifesto” to the public, he explained.

•
Sarah Lucas
(Great Britain). In 1996 London’s Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA) showcased Lucas’s piece
The Great Flood,
a working toilet that she autographed with a gold marker. “Is it a step beyond Duchamp’s
Fountain
[a urinal that Marcel Duchamp entered in an art show in 1917], a laconic metaphor for the body, or just a plain piece of plumbing?” read a sign near the toilet. (“I’d go with the latter,” wrote the London
Independent’s
art critic.) A German art collector paid $20,000 for the toilet, and when it was put on display in a Berlin gallery, two art lovers made use of the facilities—something the ICA described as “the ultimate involvement of the audience.”

•
Susan Robb
(Seattle). In 2008 The Lawrimore Project gallery showcased Robb’s one-woman exhibition “The Challenge Nature Provides,” which included a piece of artwork called
DIGESTER
— a contraption made from three 55-gallon barrels that extracted methane from human waste “provided” by the gallery’s owner, Scott Lawrimore. The methane gas was then used to fuel a campfire that was also part of the piece. “At the show opening, gallerygoers could toast marshmallows on the flames.”

Fred MacMurray (
My Three Sons
) was the model for the face of superhero Captain Marvel.

NOT COMING TO A
THEATER NEAR YOU

You’d be surprised by how many films in Hollywood are started…but not finished. Here’s a look at a few fascinating could-have-beens and almost-wases that never were
.

T
HE BREAKFAST CLUB 2
(2006)
Shortly after the influential teen-oriented dramedy
The Breakfast Club
was released in 1985, writer-director John Hughes mentioned to a reporter that he planned to make a new
Breakfast Club
film every 10 years or so, checking in on the lives of the five characters who meet in high-school detention in the first film. That plan never worked out. In 1999 Hughes started writing a sequel, but as a novel. He never finished it. In 2005 he tried again, letting the original cast know that he was writing a screenplay for
The Breakfast Club 2
in which the characters would be “nontraditional college students” in their late 30s, all in detention again. The twist was that all the characters had turned out the opposite of how they’d been in high school. The rebel (Judd Nelson) would now be conservative, the jock (Emilio Estevez) would have turned into a nerd, and so on. Hughes never managed to finish a script he liked, and
The Breakfast Club 2
will probably never happen—Hughes died in 2009.

FROM RUBEN TO CLAY
(2004)

When
American Idol
debuted in 2002, it unleashed a pop-culture juggernaut—winners such as Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood have become huge stars, and an annual
Idol
tour takes place every summer. Did you know that the pop-culture onslaught was supposed to include
Idol
movies too? The show’s production company planned to make a movie after the conclusion of each season, starring that year’s winner and runner-up. One movie was actually produced and released in 2003.
From Justin to Kelly,
a cheesy beach romance set during spring break, starred first-season winner and runner-up Kelly Clarkson and Justin Guarini. It was panned by critics and made only $4.9 million, hitting theaters just a few weeks after the
Idol
second-season finale, in which Ruben Studdard edged out Clay Aiken. The film’s abysmal performance led to the cancellation of all future
Idol
movies, including
From Ruben to Clay,
which was going to be a modern-day version of the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope “Road” movies of the 1940s, such as
Road to Singapore
and
Road to Morocco
.

Sideshow lingo: When an audience member faints, it’s called a “falling ovation.”

BATMAN TRIUMPHANT
(1999)

The fourth Batman movie,
Batman and Robin
(1997) made $100 million at the box office—a lot, but far less than the previous three Batman movies. It was also critically lambasted for being campy and cartoonish (critics especially singled out the fact that there were nipples on Batman’s costume), a far cry from the dark and gothic feel of 1989’s
Batman
. While
Batman and Robin
was still in movie theaters, Warner Bros. called off the planned fifth Batman movie,
Batman Triumphant
. George Clooney was set to return as the title hero, and it was reportedly, ironically, going to be a return to the dark feel of the first movie. The plotline included the murder of Robin (Chris O’Donnell), and villains Harley Quinn (to be played by Madonna) and the Scarecrow (Jeff Goldblum and Howard Stern were both being considered for the part) teaming up to terrorize Gotham City and cause Batman to go insane by poisoning him with a chemical gas that would make him think he was fighting the Joker, who’d died in the original
Batman
movie. A new, darker Batman movie finally emerged in 2005 under new director Christopher Nolan
—Batman Begins
.

GRAYSKULL: MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE
(2010)

Mattel Toys commissioned a line of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe toys in the early 1980s. They had originally planned to produce
Conan the Barbarian
action figures (to go along with the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie), but changed their minds because of the film’s kid-unfriendly R-rating. Good move. The He-Man toys went on to become the bestselling line of the ’80s, buoyed by the
Masters of the Universe
TV cartoon show, which followed He-Man, a muscular warrior on a distant planet, who battled an army of monsters led by the evil Skeletor. The toys’ popularity had diminished by 1987, but that’s when Cannon Films released a live action
Masters of the Universe
starring Dolph Lundgren. It was a low-budget production, and to save costs, it took place on Earth (He-Man fell into a time-space portal), not in the familiar He-Man world, and it was a box office bomb. Twenty years later, screenwriter Justin Marks was hired by Warner Bros. to write a new script that stayed truer to the source material. He turned in
Grayskull: Masters of the Universe,
a “reboot” in the style of the newer
Batman
and
Star Trek
films. Reportedly, the script was a dark-and-gritty He-Man “origin story” like
Batman Begins,
and thoughtful and serious enough that Warner Bros. thought it could be an epic on par with the
Lord of the Rings
trilogy. Nevertheless, every director offered the project turned it down, including Doug Liman (Mr.
and Mrs. Smith
) and Bryan Singer (
X-Men
). But what really killed the He-Man movie: Between 2007 and 2009, the handful of Warner executives who approved the movie were all fired…and the prospect for a big-budget He-Man film died. For now.