Bathroom Readers' Institute's Blog, page 138

Abraham Lincoln’s Duel to the Death

It seems ridiculous now, but even the smallest of grievances in the 19th century could lead to someone yelling “guns at dawn!” It even happened to Abraham Lincoln.

The future president was challenged to a duel in September 1842 by a man named James Shields. The trouble began when a satiric letter to the editor was published in The Sangamon Journal, a daily newspaper in Illinois where Lincoln was living at the time. Signed by “Rebecca,” the letter accused Shields, the Illinois state auditor, or being “a ballroom dandy.”

That was a serious insult. Worse yet, it wasn’t the first letter in The Sangamon Journal to poke fun at Shields. When he found out that the real authors were Mary Todd—Lincoln’s fiancée—and one her friends, he was furious, and challenged Lincoln to a duel.

Lincoln accepted because he had to defend his lady’s honor. He also felt he had to, because he’d written the first in the series of published anti-Shields letters. His was much more sedate—it was critical of Shields’ support of a risky state economic plan. (Lincoln had also signed his letter.)

The two parties agreed to meet on Sunflower Island in Missouri on September 22—dueling had gotten so out of hand in Illinois that it had been banned statewide. Lincoln knew he wouldn’t stand a chance at besting Shields, a skilled marksman, if they used pistols. But as he was the acceptor of the challenge, and not the instigator, he got to choose the rules, and he called for duel to be fought with swords.

Nevertheless, he was eager to end the dispute without any bloodshed. He came up with a plan: When Shields showed up for the duel, Lincoln broke out his sword and quickly sliced a large branch off a tree, proving his superior strength and reach, hoping to spook his opponent. Instead, it reportedly nearly brained Shields. Mission accomplished: Shields, realizing that the duel may not end so well for him, called the whole thing off. He and Lincoln patched things up and were later spotted politely chatting after their return from the island.

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5 Notable Entries From This Year’s Eurovision Song Contest

If you’re not familiar, Eurovision it’s kind of like American Idol, if it were judged by the songs as much as the performers and comprised entries from dozens of nations.

• Ukraine’s official entry was “Tick Tock,” performed by Mariya Yaremchuk. It seems like a basic pop music performance…except for the guy dressed for work at the office forced to run in, dance in, and fall down in a man-sized hamster wheel.

• From Belarus: “Cheesecake” by Teo. A blues-influenced song performed by a boy band with references to cheesecake both literal and metaphorical. There are also lots of references to the movie Dirty Dancing for some reason.

• The Tomachevy Sisters are real sisters —they’re twins—from Russia. They are 17-year-old pop singers and have nothing to do with their homeland’s leaders raising the ire of the world by annexing the Crimea region of Ukraine…but the crowd still booed them every time their names were mentioned. It’s politically motivated—the duo were favorites to win before the competition began, having won the Junior Eurovision Song Contest in 2006 when they were just nine years old.

• Hungary’s entry, “Running” by Andras Kallay-Saunders, was far less sunny and goofy than the rest of the Eurovision field. “Running” is an unflinching, unsettling song about a woman trying to escape a physically abusive boyfriend.

• The winner: Austria’s Tom Neuwirth. Neuwirth performed the sweeping ballad “Rise Like a Phoenix” in character as Conchita Wurst, a glamorous female singer. But he kept the beard.

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The New Fall TV Shows You Won’t Be Seeing

This month, the big 5 broadcast TV networks are unveiling their new schedules. Dozens of new shows made the cut…but here are some of the more intriguing ones that made a pilot episode that weren’t selected.

Clementine

A lifelong criminal has to go into hiding and explore her true origins…because she’s being stalked by two separate cults. Both think she has supernatural powers, and one wants her to use them for good, the other for evil. (passed on by ABC)

Tin Man

An idealistic young lawyer must defend a murderer…who is also a robot, and claims that he is innocent. (passed on by NBC)

Identity

A woman in need of an organ transplant finds a donor match: a well-connected family to which she didn’t know she was related. The CIA asks her to infiltrate the family (who gave her the organ) and take them down because they’re connected to a terrorist cell. (passed on by The CW)

Babylon Fields

Dead people in an upscale New York suburb are rising from the dead, and trying to resume their lives. All of the rotting they’d done as corpses is also healing remarkably fast, leading the community to believe that they are the next phase of human evolution. CBS picked up this show all the way back in 2007, but NBC considered it this year due to the success of the similar, walking-dead themed ABC hit Resurrection. (passed on by NBC)

Only Human

A medical drama about the world of doctors, hospitals, and high-stakes surgery. Except that some of those doctors are a set of quadruplets (three men, one woman), and also they grew up on a TV reality show. (passed on by CBS)

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Ask Uncle John Anything: It’s Gnat Time

Uncle John knows pretty much everything—and if he doesn’t, he heads his massive research library, or puts one of his many associates on the case. So go ahead: In the comments below, ask Uncle John anything. (And if we answer your question sometime, we’ll send you a free book!) This week’s question comes from reader Lisa P., who asks…

What is the purpose of a gnat?

Ah, summer. Barbecues! Trips to the beach! Tiny, annoying insects buzzing around your face and flying up your nose! Yes, the gnat is as indelible a part of summer as the Fourth of July and sunburns, but they really do serve a purpose in the intricate web of nature.

Similar to how sardine is an umbrella term for any number of small, can-worthy fish, no one single bug is a gnat. There are dozens of species in three different flying insect families, although the one you’re thinking of is the common gnat, or Culex pipiens, a relative of the more volatile but equally annoying mosquito.

Gnats travel in swarms (called ghosts) around stagnant water, forests, and your facial orifices. Not only that, but they’re especially fond of feasting on houseplants, from the leaves down to the roots, killing them slowly before you even know the damage has been done.

So just how does the gnat justify its existence? The purpose of a gnat is to get eaten by creatures higher up on the food chain that are a little less annoying to us humans: birds and bats, mostly, although some other insects eat gnats. They also pollinate flowers that grow in moist soil along waterways.

However, to the gnat’s credit, they don’t eat blood like their mosquito relatives. Some gnats live for just a few days and don’t even eat at all during their short lives. That’s because they feast in their larval state, on fungus and algae, which can be invasive.

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The Mother’s Day Backlash

Did you forget to buy your mom flowers yesterday? Good! It’s what the founder of Mother’s Day would’ve wanted.

Anna Jarvis was the mother of Mother’s Day, but her own mother, Ann Jarvis, was her inspiration. In the 1850s, she started a public health movement in rural West Virginia to educate women about the spread of disease and infant mortality. During the Civil War, she nursed soldiers from both sides back to health, and afterward, tried to help heal the nation by reaching out to its mother’s, advocating for an olive-branch like holiday called Mother’s Friendship Day.

When she died in 1905, the younger Jarvis received hundreds of cards from people whose lives her mother had touched. That gave her the idea to revive Mother’s Friendship Day, but on a bigger scale. “Mother’s Day” would celebrate not just her mother, but all mothers. The first was celebrated in 1908 at the church in West Virginia where Ann Jarvis had taught Sunday School—the younger Jarvis sent 500 white carnations to be worn by churchgoers as a symbolic gesture of the appreciation of mothers.

The holiday spread was made national and official by congressional decree in 1914. Less than a decade later, Jarvis was working to end Mother’s Day.

The American floral industry was an early backer of Mother’s Day, as they stood to make a fortune each May with the sales of white carnations. As happens today with roses on Valentine’s Day, stores routinely marked up carnations and still sold out of them. The flower people’s devious solution: It convinced consumers to buy brightly colored flowers of any kind to give to their living mothers, and to buy and wear white flowers in honor of deceased mothers. Jarvis thought all of that reeked of crass commercialism. In 1920, she publicly asked Americans to stop buying flowers…as well as greeting cards and candy, which she said were sold by crooks that undermined “one of the finest, noblest, and truest movements.” She even tried to trademark the carnation and the phrase “Mother’s Day” together, so she could legally stop the sale of the flower in conjunction with the holiday. The government denied her request.

In 1945, a few years before she died, Jarvis even knocked on doors in Philadelphia seeking signatures for a petition to do away with Mother’s Day.

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Fact-or-Fake Friday: Mug Shot Mania Edition

What follows are three weird news stories. Two of them are true…and one of them isn’t. Why? Because we made it up, that’s why! Can you guess which one is the phony? (The answer is at the end of the post.)

A.

In March, police in Utah pulled over a driver for going more than 80 mph and swerving on the interstate. The officer suspected the driver was intoxicated, and called in a K-9 unit. Police and dog searched the vehicle and found drug paraphernalia and a large bag of methamphetamine. The man was booked, charged with drug possession, speeding, and driving under the influence. In his mug shot, the man is wearing a Superman T-shirt. His name wasn’t Christopher Reeve, the man who played Superman in four movies, but it was Christopher Reeves.

B.

An Oregon man was arrested in April after he hit a parked car, then drove his car onto a sidewalk, then attacked his girlfriend when they got out of the wrecked car when she tried to take his keys away. Police booked the man, who appeared in his mug shot wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Drunk As S***.”

C.

Last week, police in New York City pulled over a man for going too slow—15 miles per hour on the West Side Highway. He was reportedly very confused about why he was being pulled over, because he wasn’t speeding. A search of his car revealed a small bag of marijuana, a pipe, and rolling papers. He was booked and charged with several counts of drug possession and driving under the influence. In his mug shot, he wears a shirt that imitates the rap group Run-DMC’s logo…replaced with the words “RUNS ON THC,” THC being an abbreviation for the active chemical in marijuana.

Want more of the patently untrue? Check out Uncle John’s Fake Facts. (Really!)

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5 Moviemakers With Very Good Years

It’s a successful year for a movie star or film director if they have one hit movie in a 12-month span. These folks just had some very good luck.

Victor Fleming (1939)

Two of the most enduringly popular and critically acclaimed movies of all time both came out in 1939: the big-screen adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard Of Oz, and the epic film version of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. Both films were directed by Victor Fleming. At least in part – he replaced Wind’s original director George Cukor just after filming started, and was replaced himself with Sam Wood for a spell. Oddly enough, Cukor served as an advisor to Fleming on The Wizard Of Oz, so Cukor had a pretty good year, too.

Mel Brooks (1975)

Three films written and directed by Mel Brooks appear in the top 20 of the American Film Institute’s list of the top 100 comedies of all time: The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein. All three are very different movies: a modern-day farce, a comic western, and a sendup of horror movies, respectively. More impressive is that Brooks made Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein in the same year, back-to-back.

Richard Dreyfuss (1977)

Dreyfuss starred in two movies that year. One of them was Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the second-highest grossing movie of the year (behind only Star Wars). The other movie was The Goodbye Girl, for which Dreyfuss won the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Holly Hunter (1993)

That year, Hunter starred in two movies: The Firm and The Piano. She was Oscar-nominated for both of them. She won the Best Actress award for The Piano, a role in which she was entirely silent. Hunter got a Best Supporting Actress nomination for The Firm, but lost to Anna Paquin, who co-starred with Hunter in The Piano.

Ben Stiller (2004)

Most A-list movie stars don’t even appear in more than two or three movies a year, and if they do, it’s rare that they’re all hits. But in 2004, Stiller appeared in six films, five of which were among the year’s top 30 grossing films: Meet the Fockers, Dodgeball, Starsky and Hutch, Along Came Polly, and Anchorman. (The sixth film? The box office bomb, Envy.)

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It Came From ‘Germophobia’: Terrible Tales of Harrowing Hospitals

We’ve got a brand new book out: Uncle John’s Germophobia . It’s all about hospital horror stories, bad doctors, botched surgeries, nightmare nurses, weird diseases, and all the things that can and will go wrong when it comes to your health. Here’s a taste of the kind of thing you’ll find inside.

A woman was admitted to Alvarado Hospital near San Diego for observation, after having suffered several falls, including one at a nursing home. She was listed in her chart as a “high-fall-risk” patient by doctors, meaning nurses were to be extra vigilant in making sure that she didn’t fall down or fall out of bed. Instead, a nurse turned off the patient’s “bed alarm,” which alerts the nursing station to a fall. The patient fell out of bed, hit her head, and died the next day. Cause of death: internal bleeding in the brain. Alvarado was fined $50,000 by the California Department of Public Health.


One patient reporting abdominal pain went to a California hospital. Doctors took X-rays and other scans and suspected that the source of the pain could be a potentially cancerous mass spotted on the right kidney. The patient was referred to surgery at Sharp Memorial Hospital. The radiology images were sent over…but were reportedly not viewed by surgeons there. They operated and removed the patient’s left kidney, not the one with the cancer in it. The patient survived, but now having no functioning kidneys, will remain on dialysis for life.


A patient checked into Antelope Valley Hospital outside of Los Angeles for a surgery to remove a bowel obstruction. The surgery was apparently successful, but in the weeks after the surgery, the patient returned to the emergency room twice, complaining of abdominal pain. Both times, doctors prescribed pain medication, believing the pain to simply be normal, if especially tough, post-surgical pain. The patient returned to the ER once more, and this time was given a CT scan. Results: a surgical retractor device had been left in the patient. In other words, she went in for an obstruction…and left with another one.

Want more horrors? Get Germophobia directly from our store , Amazon , Barnes & Noble , or your favorite retailer.

 

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Irony in the News

Nothing like a dose of irony to keep your day-to-day problems in perspective.

Ironic Revenue Service

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration is a government office that makes sure taxes are correctly paid government-wide. A report issued recently by the Treasury Inspector found evidence of massive tax evasion…at the Internal Revenue Service. It’s reported that more than 1,100 IRS employees were in tax trouble, including underreporting of income, paying their taxes late, and in some cases, not at all for several years. It gets worse. After briefly suspending bonuses to save money, the IRS restored them a year later. More than $1 million in bonuses were given to employees who hadn’t paid their federal income tax, along with permanent raises and extra days of paid time off. “We take seriously our unique role as this nation’s tax administrator,” and IRS human resources officer said in a statement. The agency also pointed out that they aren’t the only guilty parties: In 2011, more than 300,000 federal employees didn’t pay their taxes, amounting to a loss of $3.5 billion.

Irony TV

The Supreme Court is currently hearing arguments from TV networks wishing to ban Aero, an online service that streams free, over-the-air broadcast networks, such as NBC, CBS, and ABC. Networks feel Aero’s activities constitute theft; Aero lawyers argues that the signals are free, and they are merely lawfully rerouting them. In a hearing, Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia expressed concern that the service could one day stream cable networks, which people pay for. “What would the difference be? I mean you could take HBO, right?” Scalia asked. “No,” replied the Aero attorney. “Because HBO is not done over the airwaves. It’s done through a private service.” A Supreme Court justice didn’t understand that, essentially, that “It’s not TV…it’s HBO,” inadvertently echoing the channel’s long-time slogan.

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Ask Uncle John Anything: Where The Ice is Always Greener

Uncle John knows pretty much everything—and if he doesn’t, he heads his massive research library, or puts one of his many associates on the case. So go ahead: In the comments below, ask Uncle John anything. (And if we answer your question sometime, we’ll send you a free book!) This week’s question comes from reader Lisa A., who asks…

Why is Iceland called that if it’s green, and Greenland is called that if it’s covered in ice?

If we want to be accurate in our country names, then it’s true that Greenland should be the one called Iceland, and Iceland the one called Greenland. (Although Greenland is technically an “autonomous administrative division” under the official rule of the crown of Denmark.)

They weren’t named in tandem, but their histories and country name origins are intertwined. Íslendingasögur, the ancient sagas of Iceland, report that Norse explorer Erik the Red was sentenced to a three-year banishment from Iceland in approximately the year 982, his fairly light sentence for reportedly murdering a few people. That’s when he took his family and serfs and set sail for the supposedly unoccupied, ice-and-snow-covered landmass just northwest of Iceland. He named it Groenland, a Norse word which translates to…Greenland. His intent was to give it a misleading name, so as to attract settlers and make his banishment there a little more interesting.

But Greenland wasn’t uninhabited. The western part of the island is home to indigenous Inuit groups, chief among them the Kalaalit. Greenland’s present-day name for itself in the Greenlandic language, also known as Kalaallisut is “Kalaallit Nunaat,” which means “land of the Kalaallit.”

As for Iceland, it is indeed a cold country—the average winter temperature sits at freezing level—it’s name doesn’t have anything to do with that. It’s a simple corruption by way of translation. “Iceland” is the Icelandic word for “island.”

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