Bathroom Readers' Institute's Blog, page 139

A Long Time Ago in a Bathroom Far, Far Away…

Star Wars is the most heavily merchandised film series of all time. And while you treasure your original action figures and red light saber, you probably had no idea just how many Star Wars bathroom-related products have been released over the years. Use the force, Uncle John!

Is your toilet missing something? Do you think it could use a Sarlacc? Or at least some cool stickers based on that terrifying monster from Return of the Jedi? An entrepreneur named Robbie Rand and his friends tried to create some wacky movie-related analogies for going to the bathroom. One of them came up with “toss Boba Fett in the Sarlacc.” The Toilet Sarlacc is now a thing.


Han Solo’s “I know” line from The Empire Strikes Back is one of the best known, and romantic, moments in the original Star Wars trilogy. So what geek couple wouldn’t enjoy these “his and her” hand towels based on Solo’s infamous machismo?


In the early ‘80s, Kenner released a line of soaps based on various Star Wars characters. Actress Carrie Fisher hung on to a bottle of Princess Leia Shampoo and reportedly still has it. If she’s ever willing to part with the bottle, it could fetch as much as 50 bucks on eBay.


Think Geek sells both Jedi and Sith-styled bathrobes. The Jedi version comes with a hood just like the one on Obi Wan Kenobi’s robe. Unfortunately, lightsabers are sold separately.


A writer at Wired recently noted that “R2D2 can project holograms, co-pilot an X-Wing and stop a trash compactor. And, thanks to new merchandise, he can also help wipe your bottom.” This is the droid that dispenses its own toilet paper that you’re looking for.

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Ask Uncle John Anything – A “Cerealized” Feature

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 Nick P., who asks…

Why is cereal eaten with milk, and not some other liquid?

Prior to the late 19th century, the most popular breakfast foods in America were meat: bacon, ham, sausages, even steak. Some people preferred a big bowl of hot, mashed grains. Irish-Americans had oatmeal for example, the Russians like barley-based porridge, and down in the South, grits made from corn were popular.

Mueslix – a cold mix of grains, fruits, and nuts – was known in Europe, but not widely consumed in the U.S. American breakfast cereals date to the late 1800s. Directed by the vegetarian tenet of their Seventh-day Adventist Faith, brothers John and William Kellogg opened the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan. In a drive to clear visitors of toxins and improve their health, the Kelloggs advocated meat-free and high-fiber living, even at breakfast. The first of many “cereals” they developed were flakes made of mashed and toasted corn—Corn Flakes. Because the elimination of meat left a protein hole in the diet, the Kelloggs allowed Battle Creek guests to pour milk on the cereals, which also made the cereals easier to eat. It was also a logical leap – milk was often poured over porridge and oatmeal.

The cereals made their way to the general public by the turn of the century, and so did the idea of eating them with milk. In fact, early advertisements for these new-fangled foods depict cereal next to milk, gently suggesting how it was to be eaten to those unfamiliar with breakfast cereal.

But not everybody takes their cereal with milk. Around the world, yogurt, Horchata, and even water are common alternatives, not to mention soy milk, almond milk, rice milk, goat’s milk…

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Board Game Hacks

Playing board games is a great way to kill a rainy afternoon, but Monopoly can get pretty boring after a few hours. The solution: board game hacks.

Monopoly

The “Fast-Dealing Property Trading Game” is anything but. It was introduced in 1935, an era from before TV in which people had longer attention spans and would happily play this board game for the four or more hours a full game requires. That’s led to dozens of variations to shorten the game and make it more exciting. You probably have your own unofficial Monopoly “house rules,” like having all the money collected from taxes go to the player who lands on “Free Parking.” Another variant allows players to “travel” on the game’s railroads, warping from one to another. Other fans have taken their hacks to a whole different level; “Thermonuclear Monopoly” involves using toy rockets to blow up other players. Hasbro has joined in the fun and asked fans on Monopoly’s Facebook page to submit their own “rules.” They’ll include the best one in future editions, starting next year.

Scrabble

Here’s another game that can go on forever. Some people opt to play with stop watches, so each player can’t think about their move indefinitely. Others also insist that the bonus squares, which are only supposed to be used once, never expire. There’s also an entirely different game called “Speed Scrabble.” For truly silly fun, try “Made Up Words Scrabble,” which requires players to use their letter tiles to make up a word, and then define it. In a move similar to its Monopoly stunt, Hasbro has asked players to submit new words for inclusion in the next edition of the official online Scrabble Players Dictionary. So far, players have suggested everything from “selfie” to “ew.”

Operation

In 2013, two guys decided that the gentle shock that players receive while playing Operation just wasn’t exciting enough. They created a new version called “Shockeration” that delivers more of a kick via an attached, heavily wired wrist strap. One accidental touch of the side while removing “Water in the Knee” in this version can hurt. A lot. The inventors posted instructions on how to build your own…but you might want to watch the video of them and their friends getting zapped instead.

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It Came From ‘Germophobia’: The Lengths We’ll Go

We’ve got a brand new book out: Uncle John’s Germophobia . It’s all about hospital horrors, 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.

In 2001, an Australian city councilor named Hajnal Ban finally decided to do something about her lifelong insecurity with being 5’1” tall—she had elective surgery to stretch out her legs. Ban had to go all the way to Siberia to find a clinic willing to perform this highly painful, risky, and unnecessary $31,000 surgery. First, doctors broke Ban’s legs in four places, and using a horrifying bone-stretching device, extended them by a millimeter each day. That daily, unbelievable pain went on for nine months, but at the end, Ban was…three inches taller.


Due to a birth defect, a Swedish police officer’s right leg was slightly longer than his left leg. So in 2008, he found a surgeon who agreed to shorten the right one so that his legs would be equal. But the surgery was botched: The knee joint was put back in the wrong position, and one of the screws they used to hold the joint together came loose. During a second surgery, the doctor discovered another problem with the first surgery, which required a third one. That one was slightly botched, too, requiring a fourth. Each time, the surgeon had to take a little more off of the patient’s right leg—which had been two and a half centimeters longer than the left. Now it’s five centimeters shorter than the left.


When she was a child, Chinese woman Xu Juan developed a terrible infection in her left leg. Not able to get access to the best health care, that infection ran rampant and literally ate away at her thigh, causing tissue to die, her knee and hip to under-develop, and the leg itself to shrink in length by an astounding nine inches. In other words, her right leg was nine inches shorter than the other one, and she required crutches to get around. In 2014, Juan, then 21, and her parents had saved up enough money for the corrective surgery to make both of her legs the same length, and restore some normalcy to her life. Did they shorten the other leg? Nope. Doctors performed the much more complicated surgery to stretch out the too-short leg. First, surgeons extended the left leg, elongating the bones through a painful procedure to even it out with the right one. Juan topped it all off with surgeries to replace her left knee and hip joints.

Want more horrors? Get Germophobia !

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Fake-or-Fact Friday: Easter Roundup Eggs-Travaganza Edition

So two of these bizarre news stories really happened…and one didn’t happen at all on account of we made it up. The truth is revealed at the end of the post.

A.

The 27th Annual Easter Eggstravaganza in Bonita, Louisiana, turned bloody when one of the white rabbits in the petting zoo “just kinda went crazy,” said Elder Boyd Humphreys of St. Mark Missionary Baptist Church. “The Boineau twins were holding this one bunny and having their picture made, and the thing just turned and chomped down on Mackenzie’s thumb. And then her sister Madison jumped up and tried to run, but boy that thing was fast.” When the rabbit’s owner, retired schoolteacher Bonnie Delray, tried to intervene on the children’s behalf, she suffered a bite severe enough to require “several stitches,” according to the local report in the Morehouse Parish Times-Ledger.

B.

In May 2012, Cynthia Ruddell was visiting her mother’s property in Estacada, Oregon when she was attacked without cause by a neighbor’s pet duck. Rudell attempted to back away from the bird, and in the process, fell to the ground, sprained her elbow and shoulder, and broke her wrist. Rudeel was filed a $275,000 lawsuit, accusing the duck’s owner, Lolita Rose, of failing to control her pet duck, as well as a failure to “warn or otherwise inform neighbors of her duck’s dangerous propensity in attacking individuals.”

C.

A woman in Tennessee found more than just eggs while hunting for Easter eggs in her backyard with her son: she found a dead body. Tara Hanouskova of Knoxville said she has no idea how the man got under her deck, but an autopsy found that the man had been dead for two weeks. She admitted she had noticed a foul smell, but couldn’t figure out what it was until, during the egg hunt with her three-year-old son, she saw tennis shoes in the crawl space under her deck. Fortunately, her son didn’t notice, and police were “very respectful. They tread lightly. My son has no idea what happened.”

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

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Buzz Aldrin Pees Pants On Moon

It’s a red letter day at Uncle Johns’! We’re launching the first ever Bathroom Reader FOR KIDS ONLY page, complete with downloadable activities.

What does our launch have to do with astronaut Buzz Aldrin? Nothing…except…Uncle John is all about sharing amazing trivia and our KIDS ONLY page will do just that. As for Aldrin, seems as he took his first steps on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission, the urine pack strapped to his leg burst and pee ran down his pants into his boot. The good news? Not one of the million people watching on TV had a clue.

Speaking of getting a clue…a few years ago, I decided that I needed to do two things: give my brain a kick in the rear by learning lots of new things and…laugh more. Weird combination? Not if you’re lucky enough to get a job editing books for the world’s snarkiest evil-genius trivia master—Uncle John. (Okay, he’s not really an evil genius.) Before becoming the Developmental Editor of Uncle John’s FOR KIDS ONLY books, I was an editor for Highlights for Children. When people asked me what I did for a living and I told them, their faces would light up. “Oh! I loved Highlights when I was a kid!” they would gush. Then they’d talk about Goofus and Gallant or how hard it was to find the banana in a Hidden Picture. Now, when I say “I develop and edit kids’ books for Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader” people look at their feet and sort of mumble, “Hmmm.” I can tell they feel a little bit embarrassed for me. Bathroom Readers? What are those?

If you’re an Uncle John’s fan, you already know the answer: Uncle John’s Bathroom Readers are probably the smartest most info-packed books on the planet. Pick up an Uncle John’s and you’ll discover that history isn’t boring after all. Science? It’s amazing! (Astronaut Buzz Aldrin did pee in his pants on the Moon.) Even math has its good days.

Thanks to Uncle John, I now understand how airplanes stay in the air. (Lift! Thrust!) I’ve learned that the ground beneath Paris, France, is one big Swiss cheese of limestone tunnels and the whole city could collapse at any minute. (Note to self: visit London instead.) And I’ve discovered that the most devastating fire in U.S. history wasn’t in Chicago and had nothing to do with Mrs. O’Leary OR her cow. (It was nearby, however, and it happened on the very same day!)

Now…on to the reason for this blog post. I wanted to share something even Uncle John’s biggest fans might not know: We don’t just make Bathroom Readers for adults. We make them for kids, too! We have a simple formula when it comes to our kids’ books: leave out the boring stuff—put in the amazing stuff. And we’re launching a FOR KIDS ONLY page to give you a peek inside some of our latest titles.

Much as I loved working for Highlights, I would never have gotten away with The Enchanted Toilet as a book title. (Uncle John laughed out loud when I came up with it.) I also wouldn’t have been able to reveal how many atomic bombs the U.S. has “lost” around the world (see iFlush Mystery), or tell kids that the Cowardly Lion’s costume in The Wizard of Oz was made from the skins of real lions (Infomania), or been given permission to share the secret arts of real life Ninjas (The Enchanted Toilet). I would not have been able to tell the world about farting snakes or share a recipe for fake boogers (Uncle John’s Electrifying Bathroom Reader). And I definitely wouldn’t have been given the okay to call Benjamin Franklin “America’s Founding Farter” (Uncle John’s Smell-O-Scopic Bathroom Reader).

Uncle John’s has definitely kicked my brain into high gear. But I’ve also learned how to relax and Go with the Flow! So what are you waiting for? Check out our FOR KIDS ONLY page and find out exactly why I laugh out loud at my desk every day.

Kim T. Griswell

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Happy Birthday, William Shakespeare

The Bathroom Readers’ Institute is located across town from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, probably the best Bard-based theater outside of England, so it always feels like Shakespeare’s birthday around these parts. Here are some facts about ol’ Bill on his 450th birthday.

Today is Shakespeare’s birthday…probably. No records of his birth survive, but his baptismal records date to April 26, 1564. At the time, babies in England were baptized three days after birth, so April 23rd it is.


Words from pop culture routinely enter the common vernacular —”yoink” from The Simpsons, for example. People using made-up words from entertainment dates back, at least, to Shakespeare. The Bard was a master of creating new words whose meanings were instantly understood. Among the staggering 3,000 words Shakespeare created: addiction, gloomy, assassination, eyeball, manager, lonely, majestic, and swagger.


 He also, obviously, could turn a phrase. Among the common sayings that first appeared in the works of Shakespeare: “foregone conclusion,” “salad days,” “love is blind,” and “in a pickle.”


Most performed Shakespeare plays today: Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. Least produced: Pericles and Troilus and Cressida.


The average English speaker has a vocabulary of about 10,000 words. Shakespeare’s collected works comprise 31,534 different words. He was so good at picking just the right word that more than 14,000 of those words appear in his plays and poems only once.


Shakespeare was just 18 when he married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway…who gave birth to their daughter Susannah six months after the wedding.


Shakespeare is why there are starlings in America. In 1890, a man named Eugene Shiffelin decided to import a species of every bird mentioned in Shakespeare that wasn’t native to North America. One of those birds were starlings; Shiffelin released 60 starlings into Central Park in New York City.

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Cancer Zappers!

Good news: You no longer have to choose between spending all your time playing video games and trying to cure cancer.

In 2013, researchers from Cancer Research U.K. turned to an advertising company with an innovative idea: create a smartphone game that could help find a cure for cancer.

It’s not as weird as it sounds. One of the biggest hurdles that cancer researchers face is the immense amount of time it takes to analyze lab samples. Looking for cancerous genes amidst hundreds and thousands of over genes is a tedious task that takes hundreds of hours. Nor is it something that a computer program is yet able to do with a great degree of accuracy. That’s where the repetitive (but fun) activities of video games comes into play.

In March 2013, Cancer Research U.K. organized the GameJam conference. Developers from Amazon, Facebook, and Google showed up to brainstorm a concept for a game that would be both fun to play and enable players to scan samples. They kicked around a few ideas before deciding that a sci-fi theme would be the best fit.

Introducing Play to Cure: Genes in Space. In the game, players zip around the galaxy in spaceships in search of a precious substance called Element Alpha. The route their ship follows matches up with real lab samples that might contain cancerous genes. If their ship enters an area filled with complicated hazards, that means they’ve actually located cancer in a sample. The game then informs the researchers of the exact spot where it can be found, saving them tons of time in the process. In a single month, Play to Cure’s “citizen scientists” analyzed the same amount of samples that would have taken a group of experts six months to scan.

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It’s Earth Day! Don’t Trash This Page!

We probably should’ve just recycled an article from one of our books…but we didn’t. Here are some fascinating facts and statistics on recycling (and trash).

Curbside recycling programs started becoming widely adopted in the U.S. in the early 1990s. Today, about 87 percent of the country has regular access to recycling programs. It’s been effective, too—recycling of paper and paper products has increased by a whopping 90 percent in the last 20 years.


Overall, about a third of all waste is recycled in some way. That equates to 82 million tons of un-trashed trash, resulting in greenhouse gas reductions equivalent to the exhaust of 33 million cars.


Recycling is a big industry. It provides more than a million jobs, and puts more than $200 billion into the economy each year.


How much trash do you generate every day? If you’re an average American, about four pounds. In a year, Americans produce enough waste material to circle the planet 24 times.


How much does recycling one can do, really? Aluminum is very efficient. The energy saved is the same it would take to power an iPhone for 45 minutes. And new aluminum can be made out of as much as 95 percent recycled materials.


Glass is fully recyclable. So are most plastics. Nevertheless, nine million tons of glass are trashed every year. 25 million plastic water and soda bottles are tossed out…every hour.


Even more harrowing is that the U.S. throws away 21.5 million tons of food each year. That food could, of course, fed millions of starving people instead. Or, if it were still thrown away, it could’ve been composted, which would lead to a similar reduction in greenhouse gases as taking two million cars off the roads.


What do Seattle, Portland, and Berkeley, California, have in common? They’ve all banned Styrofoam food containers.


In March, Los Angeles became the biggest American city to ban plastic shopping bags. The state Senate is set to vote on a statewide ban.

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The Secret History of KFC

Beginning with its first location in an old gas station in 1930, Kentucky Fried Chicken how boasts 18,000 locations worldwide. But KFC’s history includes a few odd footnotes. And here they are.

Chain founder Harlan Sanders passed away in 1980 at age 90, but he’s much better known as “Colonel Sanders.” It wasn’t a nickname bestowed by his company’s marketing department. In 1936, Kentucky governor Ruby Laffoon declared Sanders an honorary “Kentucky colonel.” But while the title was merely a superlative, Sanders began dressing the part, growing a goatee and wearing a white suit and string tie for public appearances, embodying the image of Southern gentleman. His friends and staff even started calling him “Colonel” instead of “Harland” or “Mr. Sanders.”


In 1995, the franchise opened its first location in India, in the city of Bangalore, it didn’t go so well. The restaurant was slammed with protests organized by everybody from local farmers’ associations to anti-globalization demonstrators. It was ransacked by looters several times, which forced the local police department to guard the place around-the-clock for a year. Things have since calmed down—there are now more than 30 KFC locations in India.


The franchise is incredibly popular in Japan, where visiting KFC has become a beloved Christmas tradition.


KFC¹s legendary “11 Herbs and Spices” remain a trade secret to this day. The only full copy of the recipe is supposedly locked inside a vault deep within the company’s headquarters. Nevertheless, many people have tried to crack the code over the years. In 2009, a food writer named Ron Douglas claimed that he figured it out and published it in a cookbook called America’s Most Wanted Recipes . According to Douglas, the 11 mysterious herbs are oregano, chili powder, sage, basil, marjoram, pepper, salt, paprika, onion salt, garlic powder, and MSG.


It’s not an April’s Day joke. This spring, KFC debuted its weirdest product to date: the chicken corsage. This prom accoutrement consists of a drumstick and a small bouquet of baby’s breath. It’s available for purchase in Louisville only, and the first hundred sold out.

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