Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (46 page)

7. SAMMY PETRILLO:
My Son, the Phone Caller.
Petrillo was an awful Jerry Lewis impersonator who starred in a few el cheapo flicks, including the memorable
Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla.
This album features him doing moronic phone pranks like calling hospitals and saying that he’s got a pregnant pet gorilla in labor, then asking how to deliver the baby.

6. THE NATIONAL GALLERY:
Performing Musical Interpretations of the Paintings of Paul Klee.
Four beatniks from Cleveland introduce us to the German Expressionist painter by
performing “rock-art” song versions of his paintings. Complete with acid-drenched lyrics like “Boy with toys, alone in the attic / Choking his hobby horse, thinking of his mother.”

5. HELEN GURLEY BROWN:
Lessons in Love.
The editor of
Cosmopolitan
magazine gives advice to swinging singles on the finer points of adultery. It may have been edgy back in 1963, but today it sounds like Martha Stewart reading
Affairs for Dummies.
Side 1 (for men) covers topics like “How to get a girl to the brink and…keep her there when you’re not going to marry her.”

4. LITTLE MARCY:
Little Marcy Visits Smokey the Bear.
A creepy singing ventriloquist’s dummy visits Smokey and his animal pals in the woods. Part of an evangelical Christian children’s act, Little Marcy had an eerie grin and a high-pitched singing voice that were probably responsible for frightening thousands of kids into becoming atheists.

3. MR. METHANE: Mr.
Methane.com
.
The masked Mr. Methane is a “fartiste” in the style of Frenchman Le Petomaine. He breaks new wind by pooting his way through classics like “The Blue Danube,” Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and “Greensleeves,” proving conclusively that he doesn’t have to be silent to be deadly.

2. LUCIA PAMELA:
Into Outer Space with Lucia Pamela.
A former Miss St. Louis, Pamela claims she and her band flew to the moon in her own rocket ship to record this concept album about her trip to “Moontown.” Sounding like an off-key Ethel Merman, she clucks like a chicken when she forgets the words.

1. MUHAMMAD ALI: The
Adventures of Ali and His Gang vs. Mr. Tooth Decay.
Recorded in 1976. Ali assembled an all-star bicentennial cast, including Frank Sinatra, Richie Havens, and Howard Cosell, for this “Fight of the Century” against Mr. Tooth Decay and his evil sidekick, Sugar Cuba. Old Blue Eyes sounds like he’s working on his fifth martini as a shopkeeper who offers Ali’s gang of hyperactive kids free ice cream. The Champ sends Frankie packing back to Vegas to “tell Sammy, and all them cats like old Dino” about the horrors of periodontal disease.

Ever found something really valuable’! It’s one of the best feelings in the world. Here’s another installment of a regular
Bathroom Reader
feature.

The Find:
A dirty, moldy, wobbly old card table

Where It Was Found:
At a lawn sale, for $25
The
Story: In the late 1960s, a woman named Claire (no last name—she prefers to remain anonymous) moved to a new house and needed a small table for one of the rooms. She found one at a yard sale but it was dirty and it wobbled; a friend advised against buying it, telling her that “it would never hold a lamp.” She bought it anyway—after bargaining the price down from $30 to $25, because that was all the money she had in her purse. When she cleaned the table up, she noticed a label on the underside of it that read “John Seymour & Son Cabinet Makers Creek Square Boston.” Claire did some research on it, but didn’t learn a lot.

Nearly 30 years passed. Then in September 1997, Claire took her table to a taping of the PBS series
Antiques Roadshow.
There she learned that Seymour furniture is among the rarest and most sought-after in the United States; until Claire’s table showed up, only five other pieces in original condition with the Seymour label were known to exist. Claire thought the table might be worth $20,000; the
Antiques Roadshow
appraiser put it at $300,000. Not even close—the table sold at auction at Sotheby’s for $490,000. A pretty good price for a table that can’t hold a lamp.

The Find:
A diamond

Where It Was Found:
In Sierra Leone… under a yam

The Story:
In 1997 three hungry boys were scrounging for food near the village of Hinnah Malen in the African country of Sierra Leone. The boys, orphaned since 1995 when their parents had been killed in a rebel attack, had gone two days without food. They spent three unsuccessful hours searching for yams that morning and were on their way home when their luck changed. They
found a yam under a palm tree and dug it up. Right under the yam they found a flawless 100-carat diamond. Estimated value: $500,000. “It was easy to see,” according to the oldest boy, 14-year-old Morie Jah. “It was shining and sparkling.”

Oldest unchanged flag in history: Denmark’s has remained the same since the 13th century.

The Find:
A lost Hindu shrine

Where It Was Found:
In a cave in the Himalayas, in India

The Story:
In September 2001, a shepherd named Ghulam Qadir lost some of his sheep and set out to look for them. He crawled into a small cave, thinking they might be there… but instead of his sheep, he found a 12-inch idol of the Hindu god Shiva. The cave turned out to be a 1,500-year-old shrine, one that had been forgotten and undisturbed for centuries. Government officials were so excited by the discovery that they have promised to pay Qadir 10% of the cash offerings left at the shrine from 2002 to 2007, followed by a large final payment when the five years are up. (He never did find his sheep.)

The Find:
A swastika and a pile of pornographic magazines

Where They Were Found:
In a brand-new Jaguar automobile—the magazines were stuffed into an interior cavity; the swastika was painted underneath a seat panel.

The Story:
The discovery was made accidentally when the car was being taken apart for bomb-proofing, because this car happened to be purchased by Queen Elizabeth. The magazines and the swastika were put there during assembly by an autoworker who had no idea of the car’s final destination. “It is one of those old traditions where people used to write things behind the seat panel of cars and they were never discovered unless there was an accident,” another factory worker told the British newspaper
The Guardian,
“only this time it wasn’t funny.”

Update:
The worker responsible for the “factory extras” lost his job over the incident…but that probably won’t stop the practice of hiding things in new cars. “The chaps go to an awful lot of trouble to do the car,” says the Jaguar employee. “They’re there all day. What else have they got to do?”

Roughly one-third of all species of snakes are venomous.

It’s easy to forget that just 160 years ago, most people lived and died without leaving a single visual record of themselves for posterity. Here’s how photography began to change that.

In 1837 Louis Daguerre discovered how to create a lasting detailed photographic image. Within months of the groundbreaking publication of his photographic process in 1839, people started taking cameras to Greece, to the Middle East, to Africa, to Central and South America, and to every other corner of the world to photograph the wonders they saw there.

But if you look at these early photographs, you’ll notice that no matter what the scene, there’s always one thing missing from the picture:
people.
These first photographs appear barren and empty, completely devoid of human or even animal life. It’s as if each had been taken in a ghost town.

It turns out that there were plenty of people in these scenes when the pictures were taken; they just can’t be seen because they were
moving.
The early photosensitive chemicals took so long to form an image—30 minutes on a sunny day, an hour or more when it was cloudy—that pedestrians and street traffic passed in and out of the picture without registering.

The American inventor Samuel Morse noted this when he was invited to look at some of Daguerre’s first photographs in 1839. One daguerreotype was a view of a busy Paris street, taken in the middle of the day when there must have been hundreds of people out. Only one person—quite possibly the first ever to be captured on film—was visible in the picture, and this only because he had been standing relatively still. Morse wrote to his brother:

Moving objects leave no impression. The boulevard, though constantly crossed by a flood of pedestrians and carriages, appeared completely deserted, apart from a person who was having his boots polished. His feet, must of course, have remained immobile for a certain time, one of them being placed on the boot-black’s box, the other on the ground.

A hippo’s stomach is 10 ft. long and can hold 400 lb. of food.

The irony was that people living in the late 1830s and early 1840s wanted pictures of themselves and their loved ones more than any other photographic subject. Mortality rates were much higher then, and the pain of a death in the family was made worse by the fact that families frequently had no images of the deceased to remember them by. Only the wealthy were able to commission portraits of themselves. Now photography, with its promise of “automatic” portraits, seemed to offer the possibility of making portraiture available to everyone.

Understanding this need, photographers started looking for ways to take photographic portraits. They located their studios in rooftop glass houses to maximize available sunlight; they crammed those studios with mirrors to bring in even more light. They even filtered the sunlight through blue glass or bottles of blue liquid to take advantage of the fact that early photographic plates were especially sensitive to blue light. (Remember, the lightbulb wasn’t invented until 1879.)

Even with all of these measures, exposure times remained quite long—20 minutes or more—leaving the aspiring portraitist little choice but to resort to desperate measures. Since there was no easy way to stare at a fixed point in space for such a long time, many photographers instructed their subjects to pose with their eyes closed…and that was just the beginning: “Paint the face of the patient dead white,” one daguerreotypist advised in 1839. “Powder his hair, and fix the back of his head between two planks attached to the back of an armchair and wound up with screws.”

Posing for a portrait in such a studio was almost unbearable, something akin to having your picture taken inside a hot car with the windows rolled up and your head in a vise. The heat trapped by all that glass sent the temperature soaring, and the light from the mirrors was blinding. Looking “natural” under these conditions—sweating profusely, eyes squinting or closed, hair powdered, face painted white, head held immobile by boards while sitting perfectly still for 20 minutes or more—was just about impossible. Even when the pictures did come out, they were usually disappointing.

The U.S. has almost 4 million miles of roads and streets.

Fortunately, the first major improvements in daguerreotype photography came quickly. In 1840 Hungarian mathematician Jozsef Max Petzval invented a lens that let 22 times more light into the camera, reducing exposure times from 40 minutes to 2½ minutes. That same year, English scientist John Frederick Goddard discovered that exposing daguerreotype plates to bromine vapors increased their photosensitivity, further shortening exposures to under a minute.

So what does Daguerre’s process have to do with the modern photograph? Almost nothing. Daguerre became world famous, but his process was flawed—it only resulted in a single unique image. Daguerreotypes couldn’t be reproduced, and ultimately the process fell into disuse.

The true father of modern photography was English physicist William Henry Fox Talbot. In a sense, what Talbot did was invent the negative—a reverse image on photosensitive paper that could be used to make any number of positive prints, or “calotypes” as they came to be called. Talbot invented his process in 1835, but never published his findings or patented his original process. So when Daguerre came along two years later, he got all the credit for inventing photography. It turns out that Daguerre wasn’t just smart, he was also very lucky.

In 1840, a photographer named Alexander Wolcot opened America’s first portrait studio in New York City; the following year a coal merchant named Richard Beard opened one in London. The “nobility and beauty of England” were soon flocking to his studio to have their pictures taken; by 1842 he was making as much as £35,000 a year (in today’s currency, £1,820,400, or $2,653,415).