Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (16 page)

Blooper:
A romantic notion, but impossible: Washington is in the east and the sun sets in the west.

The average American worker has held 8 different jobs by the age of 40.

A few pearls of wisdom from
599 Things You Should Never Do,
edited by Ed Morrow.

“Never send a man to do a horse’s job.”

—
Mr. Ed

“Never lose your cigar cutter in your pocket.”

—
Martha Stewart

Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance.

—
Sam Brown

“Never bet on baseball.”

—
Pete Rose

“Never grow a wishbone where your backbone ought to be.”

—
Clementine Paddleford

“Never buy a case until you’ve tried at least one bottle.”

—
Frank J. Paul

“Never try to use a cat’s claw for a toothpick.”

—
Randy Glasbergen

“Never tell a lie till the truth doesn’t fit.”

—
American Adage

“Never run away from a gun. Bullets can travel faster than you can.”

—
Wild Bill Hickock

“Never do anything and you’ll never make any mistakes.”

—
Anonymous

“Never argue with the bouncer.”

—
Ken Cruickshank

“Never do wrong…when people are looking.”

—
Mark Twain

“Never appeal to a man’s ‘better nature’—he may not have one.”

—
Robert A. Heinlein

“Never say you know a man until you have divided an inheritance with him.”

—
Johann Kaspar Lavater

“Never try to tell everything you know. It may take too short a time.”

—
Norman Ford

Less than 1% of the population can lick their elbow. Can you?

In the second
Bathroom Reader,
we had a look at the accusation that Errol Flynn was a Nazi spy during World War II (not true). Here’s the story of how he tried to revive his fading career by starring in a screen version of
William Tell
in 1953
.

In 1935 the British film actor Robert Donat fell ill and had to drop out of the starring role in the Warner Bros. swashbuckler
Captain Blood,
prompting Jack Warner to offer the part to another actor, George Brent. Brent tried out for the role but was rejected: he looked too silly in the period costumes for audiences to take him seriously. So Warner offered the job to a nobody—26-year-old Errol Flynn, a struggling actor who had had only tiny roles in a few Hollywood films.

“I didn’t know if he could act,” Warner remembered in 1973, “but he was handsomer than hell and radiated charm. So I hired him.”

Overnight,
Captain Blood
turned Flynn into the biggest action hero in Hollywood, and he built a reputation with films like
Charge of the Light Brigade
(1936),
The Adventures of Robin Hood
(1938), and
The Sea Hawk
(1940).

If anything, Flynn’s private life was even more “adventurous” than his on-screen life. He was a hard-drinking, brawling womanizer with a fondness for underage girls, something that caught up with him in 1942 when he was brought up on statutory rape charges involving two teenagers. He was acquitted, but the humiliation of the experience reportedly broke his spirit.

Flynn was further demoralized when a bad heart kept him out of World War II. Years of heavy drinking began to catch up with him, eroding his good looks and sabotaging his box-office appeal. What little clout he had left in Hollywood was destroyed by his erratic behavior on the set and his inability to control his drinking.

Star of
Son of Captain Blood,
the sequel to
Captain Blood?
Flynn’s son, Sean Flynn.

By the early 1950s, Flynn’s career was on the ropes and he was nearly out of money. He was desperate to make a comeback and in his hour of need, turned to the genre that had made him a star nearly 20 years before: the swashbuckler.

This time Flynn hoped that starring in a film version of
William Tell,
the legendary Swiss archer, would bring him back from the dead. But alcoholism and a recent bout of hepatitis scared serious investors away, so Flynn was forced to raise funds in Europe, where he finally cobbled together $150,000 from the Italian government and $50,000 from one Count Fossataro, a former police chief of Venice. It wasn’t nearly enough money, so Flynn put $500,000, virtually all that remained of his fortune, on the line to get things moving.

Most of the money went toward constructing an entire Alpine village next to Mont Blanc in Italy; with the funds that were left, he was only able to film for two weeks, producing about 30 minutes’ worth of footage.

Desperate, Flynn packed up his 30 minutes of film and brought it to the Venice Film Festival, where he hoped screenings of it would attract new backers. But once again, his health got in the way. “Suffering from dysentery and diarrhea,” Harry Waldman writes in Scenes
Unseen,
Flynn “was more preoccupied with finding a bathroom at short notice than making polite conversation.”

Flynn’s frequent pit stops doomed his attempts to find financing, so one evening he pulled the only stunt he could think of that might get him some money—he staged a fall in his hotel and faked paralysis, in the hopes of winning a large insurance settlement from the hotel. The ruse backfired—all it did was illustrate just how troubled the star of
William Tell
was, ruining what little chance was left of getting a backer.

The film was dead, Flynn had lost his savings, and his career never did recover. He spent his final years playing the only roles that still came naturally to him—drunks—and died at the age of 50 in 1959. His 30 minutes of
William Tell
footage has been lost; about all that survives is the Alpine village itself, which today is a popular tourist attraction.

Who appeared on the first cover of People magazine? Mia Farrow.

When the folks behind Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup came up with the name, they probably had no idea they were giving their product the same name as a colonial American counterfeiter…but they were.

Mary Peck Butterworth was the daughter of an innkeeper and the wife of a carpenter in Colonial Massachusetts. In the early 1700s, she was raising seven children and her family desperately needed more money. Some women would have taken up sewing—Mary Butterworth became a counterfeiter. With a little bit of work and some experimentation, she invented a method of counterfeiting that not only produced passable bills but also left no incriminating evidence of the crime.

Here’s how she did it: First she placed a piece of damp, starched muslin on top of the bill she wanted to copy. Then she ran a hot iron over the cloth, which caused the material to pick up a light impression of the printing from the bill. Then she ironed the muslin hard enough to transfer the pattern to a blank piece of paper in order to produce the counterfeit bill. Finally, she used a quill pen to outline the writing on the bill and touch it up. The incriminating evidence—the used piece of muslin—was then burned.

Butterworth set up a veritable cottage industry. Three of her brothers and a sister-in-law helped manufacture the money. The bills were then fenced for half their face value. Over a period of seven years, the Butterworth gang made and sold over £1,000 worth of bogus bills—roughly equivalent to $130,000 today—without sophisticated technology and without being detected.

In 1715 the £5 note had to be recalled because there was a flood of phony bills in circulation. At the same time, authorities eyed with suspicion the large house Butterworth and her husband had just built, but they couldn’t prove anything.

When used to make ethyl alcohol, an acre of potatoes will produce enough fuel to fill 25 cars.

Then in 1723, one of Butterworth’s carpenters traveled to Newport, Rhode Island, to witness the mass hanging of 26 pirates. There he met three young girls. Treating them to dinner and drinks, he paid for the party with one of the many counterfeit bills he had in his wallet, but was caught by the innkeeper. After he was arrested, he quickly revealed the details of the counterfeit operation.

Mary Butterworth was imprisoned, but with no counterfeiting plates in evidence, she was promptly released. No one knows whether she gave up counterfeiting after that. Regardless, she died in 1775 at the age of 89, a respected member of the community…as far as anyone knows.

• Vincent Bethell, 28, was thrown out of a British courtroom in August 2000 after he appeared in the nude to answer charges of disorderly behavior. Bethel, a nude activist, had been arrested while walking naked through the streets of London and vows to remain naked until England’s anti-nudity laws are repealed.

• Female members of Nigeria’s ruling People’s Democratic Party threatened to march naked through Lagos if the party’s “lack of respect” for female members continues. “We are prepared to protest by walking the streets naked and camping in our nudity in front of Commodore Bode George’s house for seven days,” said protest organizer Alhaja Ali-Balogun. Displays of nudity by older women, seen as “mothers of the nation” in Nigeria, are considered taboo.

• Anti-logging activist Dona Nieto, who calls herself La Tigresa, has hit upon a novel way of getting lumberjacks to listen to her campaign to preserve ancient redwoods: she removes her top and recites “Goddess-based, nude Buddhist guerrilla poetry” while the loggers ogle her chest. “They stop their chainsaws and they stop their trucks and they pay attention,” she says. “I’ve changed some of these guys’ lives.”

What do the inventors of Coke, Pepsi, and Dr. Pepper have in common?

Planning a plane trip in the near future? Don’t read this! Fold over the corner of the page and save it for another day. We warned you.

On November 19, 2000, a drunken passenger on an American Airlines flight from Tokyo to Seattle locked himself into a restroom about an hour into the flight and lit up a cigarette. Not a good idea—American Airline flights are nonsmoking. When the man refused repeated requests to extinguish his cigarettes and come out of the restroom, the plane returned to Tokyo, where he was removed from the flight and reprimanded by airport police. He later made a written apology to American Airlines and promised “never to do it again.” Too late: According to news reports, American Airlines sued him “for losses caused by his bad behavior.”

In April 2001, Cathay Pacific Airlines fired pilot Scott Munro. Reason for dismissal: He threw nuts at the company’s chief executive after running into him at a bar. “He was dismissed for throwing things at me,” CEO David Turnbull told the
South China Morning Post.
“We have to operate a disciplined company, and you do not throw things at the chief executive.”

On November 21, 2000, a Greek businessman named Nikita Kotiadis was arrested at Athens airport after phoning in a bomb threat on his own flight. Reason: Kotiadis was running late, and he wanted to delay the flight from taking off until he could get to the airport. He might have gotten away with it if he’d placed the call himself. But he had his secretary call, and she identified him by name before putting him on the line. Kotiadis made his threat and then raced for the airport, where he was arrested on the spot. He was later sentenced to seven months in prison for “obstructing transportation.”