Bathroom Readers' Institute's Blog, page 28
January 25, 2019
It Came From Australia
January 26 is Australia Day, and so we thought we’d take a look at some inventions that we — and maybe you — didn’t know originated Down Under. Disposable Syringes In the 1940s, drug company A.M. Bickford and Sons identified a problem in the pharmaceutical market: patients who needed to inject medications, such as diabetics, […]
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January 24, 2019
Uncle John’s Favorite Fictional Toilets
Uncle John loves toilets, of course…even make-believe ones. Here are some of the best, not-quite-real commodes to ever grace movies and TV. Mr. Toilet Man The talking baby movie Look Who’s Talking proved so popular in 1989 that a sequel, Look Who’s Talking Too, hit theaters a year later. This one finds babies (voiced by […]
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January 23, 2019
What Beautiful (and Rare) Eyes You Have!
It’s common knowledge that most people are right-handed, and that most people have brown eyes, and most people have type-O blood. So just how rare (or common) is it to not possess those traits? Eye Color The most common eye colors: brown, then blue, then hazel. Green eyes are relatively rare: only about 2 percent […]
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January 17, 2019
From the Stage to the Owners Box
It takes a lot of money to buy even a portion of a pro sports team. How’s someone supposed to get those millions of dollars together? Try being a huge success in the world of entertainment! Who has stakes in the Arena Football League? Over the last 30 years, lots of upstart football leagues have […]
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January 16, 2019
They Went Disco, Oh No!
In the late 1970s, disco so dominated the musical landscape that a lot of major bands and singers thought that it was here to stay…and that they best get on board or get left in the dust. Here are some of those wild (and mostly forgotten) attempts to go disco. Paul McCartney As one of […]
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January 15, 2019
March On: Celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.!
One of the greatest moments of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. But it wasn’t planned that way. (This article was first published in Uncle John’s Triumphant 20th Anniversary Bathroom Reader.) The March That Wasn’t In 1941 A. Philip Randolph, founder and […]
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January 14, 2019
The Biggest News From 2019
We can’t look into the future…but these people with psychic abilities say that they can. Here are some major events we can all apparently look forward to this year. The celebrity update Nicolas Aujula is technically 33, but at the age of 17 he claims he discovered that he’d been re-incarnated several times. In one […]
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January 9, 2019
What Used to Be On This Channel?
Many of the first major players in cable TV in the early 1980s are still intact today — CNN is still a 24-news network, ESPN is all sports all the time, and HBO plays movies and sports events. Elsewhere, there’s been a lot of “changing channels” so to speak, as lots of networks have changed […]
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January 4, 2019
Electronic Thingamajigs We Never Got To Fiddle With
It seems like there’s always a “must have” gadget that everybody’s clamoring to get. These are some examples of that hype…except that after their were touted and promoted, they never actually hit stores. The Phantom In 2003, a company called Infinium Labs touted a video game system called (what would turn out to be ironically) […]
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January 2, 2019
“Name” That Slang Expression
Hey, Buddy: A lot of popular, colloquial phrases involve the use of a common, generic first name. Here are the origins of some of them, Jack. “Geez, Louise” At least as early as the late 1900s, English speakers started inserting words into their speech that sounded like a blasphemous cuss word that “took the lord’s […]
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