I wonder how many people know that North Korea will be having a team in the FIFA World Cup in South Africa. We sure didn’t. It’s only the second time in history that they’ll be in the tournament, and the first time was all the way back in 1966. Fascinating.
McDonald’s has issued a recall of 13.4 million Shrek drinking glasses—they contain dangerous levels of the heavy metal cadmium. This is in both the U.S. and Canada.
A little less-than-light reading on Brigadier General Norm Cota, one of the highest ranking officers to actually fight his way up the beach that June 6 long ago.
Cota was played by actor Robert Mithcum in the epic D-Day film, The Longest Day. Here’s the trailer. (Cota’s character appears for just a second toward the end.)
Looks like Uncle John’s going to have to get himself a ticket to Pittsburgh, PA:
The Pittsburgh Penguins are looking for 250 students to help with an important task and there’s only one major requirement: You must know how to flush a toilet.
Uncle John totally knows that!
Construction is near completion on the NHL team’s new arena, the Consol Energy Center. But like with any new arena or stadium, officials need to simultaneously flush all the toilets and urinals to make sure everything is working. The Penguins are calling the June 10 event the “Student Flush,” a spinoff of their popular ticketing program known as “Student Rush.”
And they can each take a copy of Uncle John’s Shoots and Scores Bathroom Reader with them when they…go! Woo hoo! Pittsburgh here we come!
Someone wrote this bathroom-related story yesterday—and didn’t even mention the fact that the people involved are named “Mooney.” How lame is that? We would have never missed that.
You, too, can have your very own Bubble Wrap Bathroom.
Bathrooms…in Space. (Featuring Uncle John’s dream bathroom:)
Hotel bathrooms are going green. (No, that is not a guacamole joke…)
Holy Cow, we almost missed it. (Thanks, Ginger.)
“2001: Two weeks after the death of Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, fans get together and celebrate May 25 as “Towel Day” in his memory. The tradition continues each year since.”
Why towels, for the three non-Hitchhiker fans out there? Take it away, TowelDay.org:
From the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
If there’s one thing we’re suckers for here at the BRI, it’s stories that have anything to do with ninjas. Or robots. Or zombies. Or Elvis sightings. Or stories involving sightings of ninja-robot-zombie-Elvises. Which is more common than you might think.
Where were we? Oh yeah: Ninjas!
A group of would-be muggers in a Sydney, Australia, met their match Tuesday night in the form of black-clad ninjas.
The three stalked and attacked a German exchange student, 27, in a dimly lit alley that fortunately for the victim ran behind the Ninja Senshi Ryu warrior school…
“The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century.
That milestone has now been reached, and in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain’s autobiography. The eventual trilogy will run to half a million words, and shed new light on the quintessentially American novelist.”
Back on April 20 we ran the story of our first president’s library book problem, and even ran an exclusive photo of the presidential delinquent:
Well the good people running George’s estate, Mount Vernon, have returned a copy of the same edition of the book to the library. (But not the fine—which would be in the neighborhood of $300,000.)
Ignore that man behind the oil slick:
Last night CBS Evening News aired a segment on the oil spill and included a clip of BP contractors turning the CBS crew away from investigating part of the oil-drenched Louisiana shoreline under threat of being arrested if they proceeded. The contractor, or a Coast Guard…it’s not quite clear, told CBS that they were merely enforcing BP’s rules.
BP’s rules? That was a public beach! Unbelievable!
Here’s the video:
Here’s a NASA pic of the slick from two days ago:
Our irregular “Wednesday Wrap” let’s you quickly look at what’s been going on for the last week at Uncle John’s Blog. Right to it:
Saturday, May 8: The Vending Machine Skirt!, and video of a mama bear Shaking the Tree.
Monday, May 10: Toilet Paper Bandit Collared.
Every great journey begins with one little joke:
“The other thing is that I write very slowly—painfully slowly—and while yes, I really want it to look spontaneous and random, generally I’ll spend a lot of time just on the first joke, till it seems right, and then I’ll think, OK, what would be a good one to go after that. At that point I’m really not thinking about how it’s going to end or how it’s going to be structured—only about what the next joke will be. And then the next joke after that.”
Reader Tasha McGee has kindly sent along a story related to one we did in our brand new Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Plunges Into Canda, Eh, and also related to her own family history:
I was just reading “Plunges Into Canada” (love it, but the way), and I came accross the story about Gander the dog. Well, I was in Ottawa in August ’09 for the Hong Kong Veterans Memorial Wall unveiling (my grandpa was a P.O.W) and there was a bunch of… memorabilia, I guess you’d call it, about the war time. I took the following pictures that I thought I would share.
Really appreciate it, Tasha, must have been quite a trip. Here’s that photo of Sergeant Gander:
That is one good looking dog. And from Plunges Into Canada (page 37)—here’s the truly amazing story of Sergeant Gander:
The New York Times reports that the last of the chorus girls from the one-time American entertainment institution, the Ziegfeld Follies, has died:
“For a quarter century, Florenz Ziegfeld auditioned hundreds of thousands of young women vying to become chorus girls, the Ziegfeld Girls, those lace and chiffon visions of glamour who were as much a part of the Jazz Age as Stutz Bearcats, the Charleston and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
In all, from 1907 to 1931, he picked about 3,000, and on Tuesday the last Ziegfeld Girl died. She was Doris Eaton Travis, and she was 106.”
She had quite a story:
Mrs. Travis may have been the youngest Ziegfeld Girl ever, having lied about her age to begin dancing at 14. She was part of a celebrated family of American stage performers known as “the seven little Eatons.” George Gershwin played on her family’s piano, and Charles Lindbergh dropped by for “tea,” Prohibition cocktails.
And she kept on dancing until she was 104, and even appeared at a charity event just two weeks ago.
• Here’s a book that was written about Mrs. Travis in 2006, Century Girl:
Similar in approach to a graphic novel, this biography-in-collage tackles the life of Ziegfeld Follies star Doris Eaton. Each page offers a wild mix of illustrations, doodles, photos and memorabilia from Eaton’s archives, accompanied by handwritten text outlining her fascinating life, which comes across like something out of the musical Gypsy.
• Here’s video of Doris dancing—when she was 104:
It was there a few months ago—but now it’s gone. Astronomers have no idea why:
Jupiter has lost one of its prominent stripes, leaving its southern half looking unusually blank. […]
The band was present at the end of 2009, right before Jupiter moved too close to the sun in the sky to be observed from Earth. When the planet emerged from the sun’s glare again in early April, its south equatorial belt was nowhere to be seen.
Check it out:
Over at our Facebook page a commenter left an email address where people could send ideas to help with the Gulf oil spill – and what a great idea! (Thanks, Krazy Wild Mann.) That led us to do some snooping, and we found several places where people can find out how they can help, whether by reporting finding oiled birds if you’re in the Gulf region, or contributing to cleanup funding efforts. So here goes.
• Here’s the official Deepwater Horizon Response Web site:
They tried the cofferdam, now they’re on to the “top hat,” then they may try the weirdest one—the “junk shot:
It sounds to us like BP is now grasping at straws trying to outsmart the growing gulf coast oil spill. As their next plan of action engineers will shoot a pile of trash at high speed into the blowout preventer at the site of the leak on the ocean floor. Experts in the oil field call this maneuver the “junk shot”.
Let’s hope they don’t need to go that far.
• Some random info from the NOAA:
By the Numbers to Date:
- Personnel were quickly deployed and approximately 10,000 are currently responding to protect the shoreline and wildlife.
- More than 290 vessels are responding on site, including skimmers, tugs, barges, and recovery vessels to assist in containment and cleanup efforts—in addition to dozens of aircraft, remotely operated vehicles, and multiple mobile offshore drilling units.
- More than 1 million feet of boom (regular and sorbent) have been deployed to contain the spill—and more than 1.3 million feet are available.
- Nearly 3.5 million gallons of an oil-water mix have been recovered.
- Approximately 325,000 gallons of dispersant have been deployed. More than 500,000 gallons are available.
And here’s a great graphic illustrating what they’re trying to do with relief wells. (They’ll take months to work at least.) Click for a really large picture:
Some stories are tailor-made for the Bathroom Reader:
The “toilet paper bandit” who allegedly robbed a Lincoln convenience store last month has made headlines in newspapers as far away as London and on the Drudge Report.
His fame may have been short-lived, however.
Joshua Nelson, 29, of 121 E St. was arrested Saturday evening for robbery and use of a weapon to commit a felony.
On April 24, Nelson allegedly entered Kabredlo’s at 1445 S. 17th St. armed with a knife and demanded money.
The robber had toilet paper wrapped around his head to conceal his identity.
