Blog Posts

RIP: John Callahan

He wasn’t for everyone, but we sure liked him.

“John Callahan, a quadriplegic, alcoholic cartoonist whose work in newspapers and magazines made irreverent, impolitic sport of people with disabilities and diseases and those who would pity and condescend to them, died Saturday in Portland, Ore. He was 59 and lived in Portland.”

Here’s his Web site. It actually has a section titled “Free Animations,” and visitors are invited to take one or more, asking only that you provide a link back to the site in exchange. What a guy. Here’s a fairly mellow one that’ll give you a bit of an idea what John Callahan was all about:

San Diego Comic-Con Round-Up

This is Secret Agent M reporting. Comic-Con is officially over. Beside more pictures of great costumes and booths, below you will find highlights of the induction of Sylvester Stallone to the Action Hero Hall of Fame, the annual Zombie Walk, and SYFY/EW’s red carpet event. For those who followed all the Comic-Con news, I was no where near Hall H and know nothing about the guy who stabbed the other guy in the eye because he was sitting too close to him at a panel.

Now to the fun stuff:

Whiplash from Iron Man.

Joker from “The Killing Joke” and Harley Quinn.

Drew Struzan: Movie poster artist of Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones fame.

San Diego Comic-Con: Photostream

The world’s premier comic book convention is going on right now in San Diego – and we have a BRI agent there taking photos of the fantastic sites. We’re going to be adding photos to this post throughout the day; should be a blast.

Let’s get things rolling with the first image, just sent to me via the marvelous Mana’s mobile:

Iron Man bad guy?

Sailor Moon!

The real Chewbacca!!! Peter Mayhew!

Green Lantern Girl and…that guy

Rare 90-Year-Old Tree Flowers for the First Time

Very cool story from the wild world of, well, the Wild:

One rare tree specimen in Ireland is proving that it’s never too late to try something new. Some 90 years after being planted on an estate outside of Belfast, a Goat Horn Trees [sic], native to China, is flowering its pale, aromatic blossoms for the very first time ever. Sadly though, it’s attempt to find another tree with which to reproduce will likely be in vain as there’s only one more like it in the whole country.

Sad little tree.

Here’s some more information on Carrierea calycinea, and a nice pic of the tree’s flowers:

Announcing the Bathroom Reading Month Scavenger Hunt Winners!!!

Dear brave souls that participated in our scavenger hunt:

We thank you all for taking the time to research, take pictures, and get creative with each of our clues. Over the next couple of weeks, we will share some of the awesome pictures/answers with you all. As promised, the winners have been picked and notified. And…here they are:

Grand-prize winner (iPad):
Anna Harmon

Runner Ups (10 signed Uncle John’s Bathroom Readers):
Mary Jane Crewe
Brian Breslin
James King

Read on for all the answers.

Double-Rainbow Man

Hooo-oot! The internet has a new star. Paul “Yosemitebear Mountain Giant” Vasquez took a video of a double rainbow at his property in the vicinity of Yosemite National Park in California. And he talked about it. On the video. It has received more than 2 million viewers on YouTube in less than three days. It is, in a word, high-larious.

We should note that Vasquez insists he was not under the influence of any illegal substances at the time. He was just “happy.”

Somebody went on to add some music:

Here’s an Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader salute to Yosemitebear Mountain Giant, our brand new favorite practically famous person. Oh, and here’s a pic:

A Land Down Under, and a Coincidence

We thought you all might enjoy a morning wake up song. Or to put it another way: Get to work!

Holy cow! I had just put that bit of the post up, then went to look for an interesting bit of extra info about Men at Work—and found this:

Men at Work star Greg Ham fears he’ll be forced to “sell his house” to pay out royalties for their 1980s hit Down Under after the band lost a copyright battle over the song.

A judge in Australia has ruled that the flute solo in the track samples parts of Kookaburra Sits In The Old Gum Tree, a song written by an music teacher for the Girl Guides in 1934.

The song’s composers, Colin Hay and Ron Strykert, will have to pay bosses at Larrikin music publishers five per cent of the song’s proceeds dating back to 2002, as well as royalties from future earnings. […]

No one detected it – I didn’t detect it and I played the f***ing thing. I was looking for something that sounded Australiana – that’s what came out – it was never Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree.

I must be a bit psychic today.

Here’s the Kookaburra song, done with the Aussie dance that Aussie kids do to the song. Let us know what you think: Can you hear how the flute part in “Land Down Under” might have borrowed from it?

Happy Birthday, Ringo

Mr. Ringo Starr turns 70 today – yikes! – and he’s got a message for everyone about what he’d like for the occasion:

“Ringo Starr turns 70 on Wednesday, and he doesn’t want any presents.

Instead, the famous Beatles drummer is making it clear, via his website, that the ideal gift to him would be for everyone to throw up a ‘peace’ sign with their fingers and say aloud, ‘Peace and Love’ right at 12 p.m. on his birthday.”

We, uh, missed it. So let us here at the BRI say just a few hours late: Peace and Love! Woo hoo!

And a tidbit about one of Ringo’s most famous songs, from page 13 of Uncle John’s UNSINKABLE Bathroom Reader:

The Oil Spill Board Game

Someone has found a rare 1970s board game produced by British Petroleum – BP – now infamous for the still-gushing catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. The goal of “BP Offshore Oil Strike” is to get filthy rich drilling for oil – but you have to watch out for the pesky hazards:

But BP Offshore Oil Strike players must also avoid the dreaded ‘hazard cards’, which state: ‘Blow-out! Rig damaged. Oil slick clean-up costs. Pay $1 million.’

Goodbye to another great Bathroom Reading Month!

Another June is National Bathroom Reading Month is behind us. We hope you had a lot of fun with the scavenger hunt. Our fun is just beginning as we start to get your answers in our inbox. Thanks everyone for playing along.

Remember that you have till July 5th to send in your answers. If you are just seeing this, CLICK HERE to get the list of 22 clues. If you run out of time, or simply can’t do everything, send us what you have anyway. We plan on giving random prizes out for some of our favorite answers. Make sure to include your mailing address in the email.

Good luck!

BRI

Russian Spies and UVB-76—a Link?

A few weeks ago we posted on the mysterious Russian shortwave radio signal known as UVB-76:

Long story short: It’s a shortwave radio station broadcasting from near Moscow, Russia, that has emitted a pulsed buzzing sound every day, all day, for the past 28 years. Nobody knows why. Sometimes very faint voices can be heard behind the buzz, and twice in all those years it stopped for a few seconds…and a man could be heard saying something Russian.

And now…it has stopped.

And now we have yesterday’s news that eleven Russians have been arrested in the U.S. for spying:

Great White Shark Spotted Off Massachusetts

Summer has begun—so bring on the shark stories.

And on that note, here’s a list of shark attack facts from Uncle John’s AHH-INSPIRING Bathroom Reader (p. 104), a book you may want to add to your bathroom reading library:

• Sharks can detect the heartbeats of other fish.

• Mako sharks have been known to jump into the very fishing boats that are pursuing them.

• Bull sharks have been known to kill hippopotamuses in African rivers.

• Approximately 10 times more men than women are attacked by sharks.

• While in a feeding frenzy, some sharks bite their own bodies as they twist and turn.

• A 730-pound mako shark caught off Bimini in the Bahamas contained in its stomach a 120-pound swordfish—with the sword still intact.

• Lemon sharks grow a whole new set of teeth every two weeks.

• Sharks have a sixth sense. They can navigate by sensing changes in the Earth’s magnetic field.

• Sharks will continue to attack even when disemboweled.

Ants!

We’re delving into amazing, mind-boggling, supercool, and largely unknown by most people facts about ants. Not ones like “Ants can lift over ten gajillion times their body weight—because everyone knows that!

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