In late April in Portland, Oregon, the real Marge Simpson passed away at age 94.
Allow us to explain. Margaret Groening was the mother of Matt Groening, the cartoonist who created the comic strip Life in Hell, and later, when he didn’t want to sell the TV rights to Life in Hell, an animated family sitcom called The Simpsons, which you may know as one of the longest-running and universally beloved entertainments of all time.
UPDATE: We have our 3 winners! Amy S., Rbecca S., and Eric S. have been contacted via email.
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Pop Quiz time!
Do you have horrid memories of pop quizzes from your school days? We’re looking to change that, by awarding prizes just for answering. No ditching class necessary.
So here’s the question (comment below):
Name one thing you’ve learned from an Uncle John’s book.
Tell us something fun. Like that yak milk is pink. Or that the world’s most stolen food is cheese.
You’ll all get an automatic “A” but three random winners will get an “A+” and win our two new kids books: Uncle John’s Infomania Bathroom Reader For Kids Only! and Uncle John’s Smell-O-Scopic Bathroom Reader For Kids Only!.
Must enter by May 10, 2013, midnight PST. Winners will be announced on May 13, 2013. Open to US residents only. Entrants must be 18 years or older.
READY, GO!
All aboard? Back in February, Australian billionaire Clive Palmer held a press conference to announce his plans to build a duplicate of the Titanic—arguably the most famous ocean-liner in history. The original Titanic, billed as “unsinkable,” hit an iceberg in 1912 and sank. Palmer is calling his ship, of course, Titanic II.
Think that might be a bad idea? Of course you do. And you’re not alone. While Palmer promises that Titanic II will have a stronger, more iceberg-proof hull (and way more lifeboats), critics say that the new ship makes a mockery of the hundreds of passengers who died on the original Titanic. Descendants of survivors of the disaster are even passing around a petition to block the construction of Titanic II.
Surefire blockbuster Iron Man 3 gets the summer movie season going when it’s released tonight. The villain who will try to take down Tony Stark this time: The Mandarin, an original character from comic books of the 1960s. Fortunately, the blatantly racist, stereotypically Asian elements of the character have been toned down for the movies (and he’s played by Sir Ben Kingsley).
Here are couple other questionable—and offensive—comic book characters.
So awesome. (Click on the pic for a very big version, and go here for a really big one.)
Caption: “Arlington Row, Bibury, built in 1380 as a monastic wool store. The buildings were converted into weaver cottages in the 17th century.”
Just beautiful. Makes us want to put on a pair of fuzzy slippers, sit next to a toasty fire, and sip a stout or three!
• Many more pics here.
• ChillOutSpots.com on Arlington Row. (And just because it’s bugging us – they’ve got a typo! “Dinning” for “dining”! AHHHK!)
Oh—that made us read closer:
You probably use Google, Bing, or Yahoo! to find things on the Internet, but have you ever heard of Shodan? Like the competition, it can be used to search the web for celebrity gossip and Game of Thrones spoilers, but unlike the competition, Shodan specializes in helping hackers to navigate the Internet’s back channels.
An Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader PSA: Every National Park in the U.S. has free admission this coming week!
From our National Park Service:
Did you know that National Park Week is April 20-28, 2013?
Did you know that there are 401 national parks? That they include seashores, battlefields, historic homes, archeological sites, and spectacular natural areas?
Did you know there is at least one national park in every state? …
You can plan your visit by what you want to do, or where you want to go … or you can browse our event calendar and check out the special programs offered that week. Also, from Monday through Friday, April 22 to 26, every national park will have free admission!
Free admission—that’s a big savings if you go to a park with your family or a group of friends, just to note.
And if you need a bit of a guidebook—we have a whole book on National Parks! (No way! What a coincidence!)
Some of the scintillating subjects you’ll find in this volume:
Masters UPDATE: Adam Scott – WHAT. A. PUTT. Wow.
And now holy cow, Angel Cabrera. What a finish coming up…
Congratulations, Adam Scott and Australia! Wow! What a finish! (And Angel Cabrera – you are a class act. Nicely done! And very nice of Scott to give a nod to the Shark. All around very nice day of golf.)
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Hey, did you know you can get your favorite golf fan the best book on golf ever made! No, not that one – this one!
Check out this review at Amazon:
Every year for Christmas, I get my husband an Uncle John Bathroom Reader – as the throne room IS his favorite place to read. He is a golfer, too. THIS book has to be one of the funniest since the laughter floating out the bathroom door was just plain fun to listen too. Later on or days later on the golf course, he would be sharing the stories he read and the laughter would begin again.
This year, I gave him a new padded toilet seat for his throne and 3 Uncle John Readers! I do believe it was one of the best choices I’ve ever made as far as gifts go…especially on the grin and giggle meter!! Thanks, Amazon for having the best choices.
And it’s not just humor, check out this sample:
As the East Coast prepares for the cicadas invasion due sometime in the next month, we dig in our vault to find some more information about this tiny, yet noisy bug. The following article is from Uncle John’s Fully Loaded Bathroom Reader.
BIG NOISE, LITTLE BUG
Cicadas are the vuvuzelas of the insect world. (What are vuvuzelas? Those loud horns that nearly caused soccer fans’ brains to explode during the 2010 World Cup.) Vuvuzelas reach a decibel level of 60, but cicadas? These little bugs can reach a decibel level twice that loud.That’s as loud as a rock concert or a jet engine.
BROODY BUGS
Cicadas are bizarre, especially the “periodical cicadas” that live only in eastern North America. What’s odd about them is that they’re on either a 13- or a 17-year cycle. They emerge in “broods” of so many bugs it’s like some shock-and-awe insect invasion, make a lot of deafening noise, mate, lay eggs, and, within just a few weeks, die. Then they disappear again for an another exact number—13 or 17—of years. Entomologists are still trying to figure out what makes periodical cicadas tick. The main problem: those long cycles. It’s difficult for scientists to study an insect that shows up only once or twice in their careers. The name cicada is Latin for “tree cricket,” which is actually incorrect: cicadas are not crickets. And though one species is commonly called the “17-year locust,” they’re not locusts, either. Locusts are “eating machines” that can devour entire crops. Cicadas don’t eat leaves; they’re sapsuckers, like their closest relatives leafhoppers and spittlebugs. Cicadas have also been called “jar flies,” “harvest flies,” and “dust flies,” but their Australian nickname, “galang-galang,” which echoes the racket they make, may be the most fitting.
Last month, Ford Motors landed in hot water after a series of sexist advertisements it ran in India.
The three ads feature illustrations of Paris Hilton, former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, and German racecar driver Michael Schumacher each sitting in the front seat of a Ford Figo. In each ad, the celebrity had their “enemies” tied up in the trunk (to demonstrate how big it was). Hilton had paparrazi bound and gaggedl Schumaker had rival drivers. Berlusconi had a bunch of scantily clad models in his trunk.
Of course, this isn’t the first time an ad campaign has courted controversy. Last year, the makers of Pop Chips thought it would be hilarious to dress actor Ashton Kutcher up as “Raj,” a sleazy, thick-accented Bollywood producer and stick him in a commercial. Following an outcry on the Internet, the company yanked the ad. But here it is!
Move over, old Funny Hall of Fame, there’s a new kid (ferret) in town:
Gullible bargain hunters at Argentina’s largest bazaar are forking out hundreds of dollars for what they think are gorgeous toy poodles, only to discover that their cute pooch is in fact a ferret pumped up on steroids.
One retired man from Catamarca, duped by the knock-down price for a pedigree dog, became suspicious he had bought what Argentinians call a ‘Brazilian rat’ and when he returned home took the ‘dogs’ to a vet for their vaccinations.
Imagine his surprise when his suspicious were confirmed – he had in fact purchased two ferrets that had been given steroids at birth to increase their size and then had some extra grooming to make their coats resemble a fluffy toy poodle.
Meat is getting a makeover. Meat cuts are renamed to give them more marketing flair.
As the weather gets hotter and more and more Americans’ fancy turns to thoughts of grilling, the beef and pork industries are planning on some thick and juicy changes. They’re going to rename as many as 350 different cuts of meat.
This has nothing to do with the recent horsemeat scandals at European IKEA stores and Burger Kings. Rather, the industries want to promote their products with some marketing flair while at the same time eliminating confusion over the same cut of meat having multiple, often long and confusing names.
In the study, published in the journal Science, researchers at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, in Kyoto, western Japan, used MRI scans to locate exactly, which part of the brain was active during the first moments of sleep.
They then woke up the dreamer and asked him or her what images they had seen, a process that was repeated 200 times. These answers were compared with the brain maps that the MRI scanner produced.
Researchers were then able to predict what images the volunteers had seen with a 60 per cent accuracy rate, rising to more than 70 per cent with around 15 specific items including men, words and books, they said.
April Fools’ Day 2013 will go down in history as one that was particularly saturated with public pranks. Among our favorites:
• Outdoor supply company REI announced that it would be selling “Adventure Kitten Gear”. Among the items: a “Wild Cat” backpack that held “100 cubic inches of kibble and catnip,” and an $11 bandana that “doesn’t do anything, but looks cute in photos.”
• The British car show Top Gear announced it was filming in the Netherlands, and that in order to set a new land speed record, a busy 20-mile stretch of highway outside of Amsterdam would have to be closed. Citizens grumbled about the delays and rerouting…until it was revealed that there was no show. It was all a prank from a mischievous Dutch police officer.
Aw, rotten news:
Roger Ebert, the popular film critic and television co-host who along with his fellow reviewer and sometime sparring partner Gene Siskel could lift or sink the fortunes of a movie with their trademark thumbs up or thumbs down, died on Thursday in Chicago. He was 70.
His death was announced by The Chicago Sun-Times, where he had worked for many years.
Mr. Ebert’s struggle with cancer, starting in 2002, gave him an altogether different public image — as someone who refused to surrender to illness. Though he had operations for cancer of the thyroid, salivary glands and chin, lost his ability to eat, drink and speak (a prosthesis partly obscured the loss of much of his chin, and he was fed through a tube) and became a gaunter version of his once-portly self, he continued to write reviews and commentary and published a cookbook he had started, on meals that could be made with a rice cooker.
Much more at the paper he wrote for for decades, The Chicago Sun-Times.
And he had a very funny and wise FaceBook presence, and the same on Twitter – where he was posting up until very recently.
Oh – just saw this: just two days ago Ebert announced that his cancer had returned – and that he was taking a “A Leave of Presence“:
On Foley and Great Titchfield Streets in London, there was an underground public men’s restroom built in the 1890′s accessible via its own caged entrance in the middle of the sidewalk. There were quite a few of these facilities built at the time which were used until the 1960′s, when they were locked up and left in disuse for the next 50 years.
A few years ago, the city sold off these odd spaces to various enterprises. In the case of the underground toilet on Foley Street, some restaurateurs took it over and have turned the abandoned urban outhouse into a remarkably pleasant little espresso cafe.
It’s called “The Attendant.” Just another public toilet turned into coffee shop. Here are some pics. The first one we snagged from Google Street View. It’s the green cage on the sidewalk! (And never mind that Google Street View thinks that parking sign in the coffee shop.)
Here at Bathroom Reader HQ we just finished up another book—look for Weird Inventions on bookstore shelves in May. It’s a silly, mind-boggling collection of strange gizmos and bizarre products you can’t possibly live without. Here’s a little preview.
