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Bathroom Readers' Institute's Blog, page 186
October 25, 2012
The World’s Thinnest House
At only 4 feet wide, this house is the thinnest house around. Located in Warsaw, it comes fully equipped with a small kitchen, bathroom, sleeping area/office, and a bean bag for a couch. Pictures of the outside and assembly can be found here.
Yahoo Homes explains the idea behind the house:
“Architect Jakub Szczesny of the Polish firm Centrala built this as a working studio for Israeli writer Etgar Keret, and other artists are expected to stay here as well. The Keret Home, as a sign on the front door declares it, is technically considered an art installation.
The PR agency representing the project told me that Keret will be “host” of the home for three years but “won’t live there permanently. He will drop in from time to time, invite guests, create, etc.”
Keret considers the home “kind of a memorial to my family,” the AP reported. His parents survived the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland, but their families were wiped out. In Tablet, a Jewish online magazine, Keret wrote about how his father managed: “During World War II, my dad, his parents, and some other people hid in a hole in the ground in a Polish town for almost 600 days. The hole was so small that they couldn’t stand or lie down in it, only sit. When the Russians liberated the area, they had to carry my father and my grandparents out, because they couldn’t move on their own.”
A great story of art imitating life.
October 24, 2012
Bollywood Director took India to the Alps
Yash Chopra was a man with extraordinary vision. Not only did he become famous for the exaggerated stories of courtship in his Bollywood movies, he also magically transported the Indian actors to the Swiss Alps for fantastic scenes of song and dance. As a result he gave the world the classic Bollywood film style that we recognize today, and significantly multiplied the number of Indian tourists that now visit the Alps.
Chopra passed away on October 21 at the age of 80, but leaves behind a unique mark in film history. As reported by NPR:
Starlets in chiffon saris, completely inappropriate for Alpine climates, would flutter in the wind against breathtaking backdrops; heroes would emerge from behind pine trees to sing of a love that would last lifetimes. Switzerland’s landscapes featured so prominently in Chopra’s films that it has become one of India’s top tourism destinations. The Swiss even unofficially named a lake after the filmmaker for his contribution to the country’s unexpected fame in South Asia.
But Chopra’s films rose above a kitschy musical pastiche to become enduring works because they also dealt with very real and complex relationships. He tackled regional conflicts, infidelity and betrayal — and the resolutions of those universal human struggles. And all those multigenerational family sagas were beautifully projected onto the big screen. They featured song lyrics written by poets, and superstar ensembles whose performances won countless awards.
October 23, 2012
CONTEST WINNER!
AND YOU WON’T BELIEVE IT!
SOMEONE ACTUALLY WON!
It was Greg. Greg C.
(Man, that was anticlimatic.)
Greg C. – your name was personally picked in a random draw of the more than 240 entries by the uncle of all uncles himself: Uncle John! Congratulations!
What you have won: You have won one wonderful big beautiful book! This one:
The brand-spanking new Uncle John’s Fully Loaded 25th Anniversary Bathroom Reader! 608 pages of BRAND NEW bathroom-reading BLISS!
YEE HAWWWWW!
Thanks for playing everyone!
Greg, you will be contacted by one of our secret agents soon. Enjoy!
October 22, 2012
Audio: Whale Sounds Like Human Being [update: sounds like "Chacarron"!]
This is so funny. It sounds like a slightly tipsy dude singing nonsense lyrics through his nose:
The whales are known as “canaries of the sea” for their high-pitched chirps, and while a number of anecdotal reports of whales making human-like speech, none had ever been recorded.
When a diver at the National Marine Mammal Foundation in California surfaced saying, “Who told me to get out?” the researchers there knew they had another example on their hands.
Once they identified NOC as the culprit, they made the first-ever recordings of the behaviour.
A whale told a human to get out of the water? Hmm…
Here’s audio, via BBC:
October 20, 2012
October 20, 1977: The Lynyrd Skynyrd Plane Crash
Thirty-five years. Wow.
ABC News radio report:
From the November 1977 Rolling Stone interview with survivor Billy Powell, the band’s keyboardist:
We had decided the night before that we would definitely get rid of the plane in Baton Rouge. So we started partying to celebrate the last flight on it. The right engine started sputtering, and I went up to the cockpit. The pilot said they were just transferring oil from one wing to another, everything’s okay. Later, the engine went dead. Artimus [Pyle] and I ran to the cockpit. The pilot was in shock. He said, ‘Oh my God, strap in.’ Ronnie [Van Zant] had been asleep on the floor and Artimus got him up and he was really pissed. We strapped in and a minute later we crashed. The pilot said he was trying for a field, but I didn’t see one. The trees kept getting closer, they kept getting bigger. Then there was a sound like someone hitting the outside of the plane with hundreds of baseball bats. I crashed into a table; people were hit by flying objects all over the plane. Ronnie was killed with a single head injury. The top of the plane was ripped open. Artimus crawled out the top and said there was a swamp, maybe alligators…
Ai yai yai.
Most everyone knows the details: The crash killed lead singer Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, his sister and backup singer Cassie Gaines, as well as assistant road manager Dean Kilpatrick, pilot Walter McCreary, and co-pilot William Gray. The rest of the band—guitarists Allen Collins and Gary Rossington, bass player Leon Wilkeson, drummer Artimus Pyle, backup singer Leslie Hawkins, and keyboardist Powell—along with other flight crew members, were seriously injured, but survived. (Several of the surving members reformed Lynyrd Skynyrd ten years later, and they still perform today.)
Many more details about the crash here.
Now get those bics out and hold em up, people! Here’s a B-side, from 1973;
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October 19, 2012
EASIEST CONTEST EVER…
How to enter this contest: by leaving a comment on this blog post saying “Hi,” or “Wattup?” or “Urkel’s bicycle stole my pajamas!” or whatever else you’d like to say.
How to win: by winning. (Er – by having your name picked in a random drawing of all comments.)
What you win: The brand-spanking new Uncle John’s Fully Loaded 25th Anniversary Bathroom Reader! 608 pages of BRAND NEW bathroom-reading BLISS!
Ain’t she purty?
• ONE entry per person.
• U.S. residents only. We’re sorry we’re sorry we’re sorry we’re sorry. You would not believe how complex and legally treacherous international laws are regarding simple contests like this. (We’re sorry.)
• You have until Monday, October 22, noon West-Coast time.
Good luck!
October 18, 2012
October 17, 2012
Omaha schoolgirl dresses as a different historical figure each day
This is how Stella Ehrhart, age 8, decides what to wear for school.
She opens her closet. She opens her book, “100 Most Important Women of the 20th Century.” And she opens her mind.
Voilà, she is Billie Holiday, in a black dress with a red tissue-paper flower tucked into her strawberry-blond hair.
Behold, she is Grace Kelly in pink satin lace on her wedding day.
Poof, she is Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, wearing a hat her aunt got her in Vietnam.
The Dundee Elementary School third-grader comes to school dressed as a different historical figure or character — Every. Single. Day. And she’s done that since the second day of second grade, when this all started.
Since the second grade! Wow. That is one inspired kid. She’s either going to be president or invent a new musical genre one day.
HufffPo has a slideshow of several of her outfits over this way…
October 14, 2012
Guinness: The Quietest Place on Earth
They say silence is golden – but there’s a room in the U.S that’s so quiet it becomes unbearable after a short time. The longest that anyone has survived in the ‘anechoic chamber’ at Orfield Laboratories in South Minneapolis is just 45 minutes. It’s 99.99 per cent sound absorbent and holds the Guinness World Record for the world’s quietest place, but stay there too long and you may start hallucinating.
[...]He said: ‘How you orient yourself is through sounds you hear when you walk. In the anechnoic chamber, you don’t have any cues. You take away the perceptual cues that allow you to balance and manoeuvre. If you’re in there for half an hour, you have to be in a chair.’
Freaky!
• More on anechoic chambers.
• The photo up top is from here, and is of an anechoic chamber built by Eckel Industries, the Massachusetts company that built the world record vault for Orfield.
October 13, 2012
Baseball Playoffs: Who you rooting for?
We’re through the Division Series. Now it’s the League Champmpionship Series, and there are just four teams left:
• Yankees and Tigers on the AL side (first game just started)
• Giants and Cards and on the NL side (they start tomorrow)
Who you for?!!! Let us know!
• Here’s something a lot of people wouldn’t know: The St. Louis Cardinals “have won 11 World Series, the most of any National League team, and second overall only to the New York Yankees with 27.”
• If you’re a baseball freak—or if you’re not and you want some help becomding one—this is one of our favorites of all of our books. It really is. Baseball has so many stories—light, dark, hilarious, profound (even far out, man), that it was just a blast to dig through it all and put together one huge book of it all. If you don’t already have it—we think you’ll like it. (Nothing but 5-star reviews at Amazon…if you’re into that sort of thing.)
