Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy (40 page)

Uncle John really loves his favorite toilet (he calls it “Commodius Rex”). But now that he’s read about these people, he’s careful to tell us that he doesn’t love it
that
way
.

B
ACKGROUND
Psychology textbooks are filled with cases of strange obsessions. There are people who can’t stop thinking about shoes, or food, or perhaps a…uh…close relative. But people classified as
objectum-sexual
are literally “in love” with inanimate objects. The term was coined in the 1970s by a German woman named Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer, who was—and still is—“married” to the Berlin Wall. “OS” people have deep emotional—and often physical—relationships with their…things. According to
Bizarre
magazine:

    Look hard enough, and you’ll discover an Internet populated by tales of love affairs with objects. Joachim A., for example, confesses to his affair with a Hammond organ that began when he was 12. He’s now in a steady relationship with a steam locomotive. Psychology student Bill R. tells of his sexual obsession with his iBook (he defines it as a homosexual relationship, as he regards his laptop as male), and Doro B. talks about falling for a metal processing machine she encountered at her work.

Here are a few more matches made in…well, we’re not exactly
where
they’re made, but here they are.

ERIKA ™ THE EIFFEL TOWER

Erika La Tour Eiffel is in love with—you guessed it—that big tower in Paris. It’s not her first OS relationship, though. She’s also a world-champion archer and credits her success to her ex-“beau”—Lance, her bow. Setting her sights on bigger and better things, the 37-year-old San Francisco woman now claims to be the wife of the Eiffel Tower. The two were married in 2007. Like most OS people, Eiffel believes in the concept of
animism
, the theory that everything has a soul—and, in turn, a personality. But the relationship is not easy, since her “husband” is solidly attached to the ground 5,500 miles away. Eiffel visits when she can but admits, “There is a huge problem with being in love with a public object. The issue of intimacy—or rather lack of it—is forever present.” To deal with these and other issues, Eiffel runs a Web site where OS people from around the world share their stories.

Nuts: The female marine Bobbit worm bites off the male’s genitalia and feeds it to her young
.

AMY ™ 1001 NACHTS

“I love him as much as women love their husbands and know we’ll be together forever,” says Amy Wolfe, a church organist from Pennsylvania. The “him” she’s referring to is an 80-foot roller coaster called 1001 Nachts, located at the Knoebels Amusement Park in the Pocono Mountains, 80 miles from her home. After a 10-year courtship, they were married in 2009. Wolfe claims that their relationship is both “sexual and mental.” Like Eiffel, Wolfe must deal with being in a long-distance relationship. To cope, she has posters of 1001 Nachts on her ceiling and carries around some nuts and bolts that she picked up from the ground underneath the roller coaster.

EDWARD ™ VANILLA

“Vanilla” is a Volkswagen Beetle that has stolen Edward Smith’s heart. Smith is part of a subculture of OS known as
mechanophiles
, people who are in love with vehicles. “I’m a romantic,” says the 57-year-old Washington man. “I write poetry about cars. I sing to them and talk to them just like a girlfriend.” But that doesn’t mean Smith is loyal. Another feature of OS “relationships” is that they’re often not monogamous. Smith claims to have had, er…physical relations with more than 1,000 cars in his life, as well as several aircraft, including the helicopter that was used in the 1980s television show
Airwolf
. But Vanilla is his current main squeeze. (He previously had a five-year relationship with another VW Beetle named “Victoria.”) What does Smith look for in a potential lover? He’s not sure; it just has to “speak” to him. “There have been certain cars that just attracted me, and I would wait until nighttime, creep up to them, and just hug and kiss them.”

NISAN ™ NEMUTAN

Nisan is a balding, heavyset 37-year-old Japanese man. Nemutan is a large, stuffed pillow printed with a picture of Nemu, a bikiniclad character from an X-rated version of the popular video game De Capo. The two first met at a Tokyo comic book convention in 2006. They became friends at first but then started spending more and more time together. Nisan took Nemutan on drives, they posed for photos together, they played at playgrounds, and they even dined together at restaurants. After three years, the couple is still inseparable. And now they’re famous, since their story was told in a 2009
New York Times
article about “2-D lovers,” a growing subculture of
Otaku
—the obsessive Japanese fandom related to
anime, manga
, and video games. It’s uncertain how many people are 2-D lovers—they’re usually productive members of society—but they care
very
deeply about these characters. “Of course she’s my girlfriend,” says Nisan. “I have real feelings for her. People are probably wondering what psychiatric ward I escaped from. I would think the same thing if I saw me.”

Designer Lauren McCarthy invented the Happiness Hat. It stabs you in the head if you stop smiling
.

OBJECTIFYING SCIENCE

As outlandish as these “love affairs” might sound, psychologists have studied them at length and have come up with a few theories on why these people become so attached to their objects.

• They’re fetishists. Fetishism, a well-documented psychological phenomenon, involves being turned on sexually by objects or body parts—say, leather clothing, or feet. But OS people maintain that their relationships are more focused on love than on sex.

• Some research suggests that there may be a link between OS and a form of autism called Asperger’s syndrome, which results in the sufferer having difficulty interacting with other people. But many in the OS community are very social and don’t fit the typical Asperger’s profile.

• Many OS people suffered from a past severe emotional and/or physical trauma and are unable to form a loving bond with another human out of fear. Put simply, they may prefer to be in a relationship where the other partner can’t abuse or leave them.

• Some theorize that OS may be just another form of sexual orientation, albeit a very rare one. Just like hetero- and homosexuality, objectum-sexuality often manifests at the onset of puberty.

Erika La Tour Eiffel can’t really explain it. She calls the feelings she has for objects “innate.” As her Web site says, “We are not looking for a cure, but more comprehension into our make-up as an emerging part of society.”

The children’s song “La Cucaracha” is about a cockroach who ruins his life by smoking marijuana
.

NEWSPAPER
CORREKSHUNS

Every once in a while, a newspaper makes a mistake. What are we saying? They make mistakes all the time. Luckily, most papers have a policy of issuing a correction. And some, like these from the very recent past, are hilerious
.

Anchorage Daily News
:

“There was an error in the Dear Abby column that was published on Monday. In the fifth paragraph, the second sentence stated that Charlie’s hiccups were cured temporarily through the use of carbon monoxide. It should have read carbon dioxide.”

The Guardian
(U.K.):
“In our entry on Garrison Keillor’s
Lake Wobegon Days
, we referred to
A Prairie Ho Companion
; we meant
A Prairie Home Companion.”

The Sun
(U.K.):
“In my column on August 22, I suggested that Sharon Osbourne was an unemployed, drug-addled, unfit mum with a litter of feral kids. This was not intended to be taken literally. I fully accept she is none of these things and sincerely apologise to Sharon and her family for my unacceptable comments. Sorry, Sharon…”

The Amherst Citizen
(Nova Scotia):
“A Nov. 9 story about Nova Scotia’s black minority was accompanied by an inaccurate photograph caption. The photo, said to depict rundown houses around Dartmouth, was actually of a pig farm.
The Citizen
apologizes for the error.”

The Sentinel-Review
(Woodstock, Ontario):
“In an article in Monday’s newspaper, there may have been a misperception about why a Woodstock man is going to Afghanistan on a voluntary mission. Kevin DeClark is going to Afghanistan to gain life experience to become a police officer when he returns, not to ‘shoot guns and blow things up.’
The Sentinel-Review
apologizes for any embarrassment this may have caused.”

Denver Daily News
:
“We would like to offer a sincere apology for a typo in Wednesday’s Town Talk regarding New Jersey’s proposal to ban smoking in automobiles. It was not the author’s intention to call New Jersey ‘Jew Jersey.’”

In 2005 a 28-year-old South Korean man died from exhaustion after playing StarCraft, an online video game, for 50 hours straight.

The Sunday Paper
(Atlanta, Georgia):
“An earlier version of this story incorrectly described Buffington’s special support hose as ‘mercury-lined.’ The hose are mercury-gauged, meaning that barometric mercury is used to measure the compression of the hose. They are not mercury-lined, which would, of course, make them poisonous.”

Us Weekly
:
“In our feature ‘Why She Left Him,’ the woman identified in the photograph as former adult-film star Ginger Lynn Allen is neither Ms. Allen nor an adult-film actress.
Us
regrets the error.”

The Sun
(U.K.):
“In an article published on
The Sun
’s website on January 27 under the headline ‘Gollum joker killed in live rail horror,’ we incorrectly stated that Julian Brooker, 23, of Brighton, was blown 15 feet into the air after accidentally touching a live railway line. His parents have asked us to make clear that he was not turned into a fireball, was not obsessed with the number 23, and didn’t go drinking on that date every month. Julian’s mother did not say, during or after the inquest, that her son often got on all fours creeping around their house, pretending to be Gollum from the J.R.R. Tolkien novels. We apologise for the distress this has caused Julian’s family and friends.”

Portland (Maine) Press Herald
:
“A story on Wednesday about foraging for edible mushrooms contained a photo of
amanita muscaria
, which is a poisonous and hallucinogenic mushroom. It was a copyeditor’s error.”

The Guardian
:
“We misspelled the word ‘misspelled’ twice, as ‘mispelled,’ in the Corrections and clarifications column on September 26,
page 30
.”

Iowa State Daily
:
“In Friday’s issue, the article ‘Decorate your dorm on the cheap’ inaccurately described furniture purchased at Goodwill and Salvation Army stores as being ‘complete with that old-urine smell.’ The
Daily
retracts its false statement and deeply regrets the error.”

MOONSTRUCK

Is our moon to blame for this crazy world?

L
UNAR-TICS
The idea of someone being “moonstruck”—driven insane by the influence of the moon—dates back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. In fact, the word “lunatic” derives from Luna, the Roman goddess of the moon. The Greek physician Hippocrates (460–370 B.C.) observed the moon’s effect on the tides, and concluded that the moon must exert some influence over the brain’s “moistness” and cause madness. This belief persisted through the Middle Ages: People refused to sleep where moonbeams might strike them, and werewolves were said to wreak havoc during the full moon.