Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy Read Online Free PDF Page B

(Watersmeet, Michigan)
    • Syrupmakers (Cairo, Georgia)
    • Jugglers (Utica, New York)
    • Bumblebees (Little River, Texas)
    • Tractors (Dearborn, MI)
    • Kewpies (Columbia, Missouri)
    • Poets (Montgomery, Alabama)
    • Mighty Unicorns (New Braunfels, Texas)
    • Orphans (Centralia, Illinois)

JUST ODD
    • Wooden Shoes (Teutopolis, Illinois)
    • Sugar Beeters (Chinook, Montana)
    • Golden Goblins (Harrison, Arkansas)
    • Konkrete Kids (Northampton, Pennsylvania)
    • Millionaires (Williamsport, Pennsylvania)
----
In 2008 South Africa passed a law making it illegal for kids under the age of 16 to kiss .
----

ECCENTRIC WRITERS

    We don’t think it’s so weird to do this stuff. But then, we’re writers .
    • Poet John Donne (1572–1631) kept a coffin in the office where he wrote. Occasionally, he’d climb inside it to remind himself how fleeting life can be, a major theme in his poetry.
    • Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), author of Gulliver’s Travels , always walked around his house while he ate because he believed that moving around while eating would cancel out the food and help him keep weight off.
    • In 2009 Sotheby’s of London auctioned off a series of largely unpublished letters of the famous Romantic poet Lord Byron (1788–1824). In them, Byron criticizes the Portuguese, who he says have “few vices except lice and sodomy.” And, in a display of bathroom humor well ahead of his time, he calls his rival William Wordsworth “Turdsworth.”
    • The Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) suffered from chronic sexual dysfunctions. After dealing with the problem for many years, he did something about it—he had the “Steinach operation,” a surgery that claimed to provide a “reactivation” of the male organs. It was basically just a vasectomy, but Yeats claimed that both his sex life and literary output greatly improved.
    • American poet James Russell Lowell (1819–91), founding editor of The Atlantic Monthly , once attended a dinner party where he carefully removed each flower from a bouquet centerpiece and, with a knife and fork, ate every single one.
    • Novelist John Cheever (1912–82) owned only one suit. He put it on each morning, then took an elevator down to the basement of his New York apartment building, where he rented an office. Once there, he took off the suit, hung it up, and wrote all day sitting in his underwear. At the end of the day, he’d put the suit back on and take the elevator home.
----
It is illegal to die in the U.K.’s Houses of Parliament, or to enter wearing a suit of armor .
----

ARE YOU A
“DEAD PEASANT”?

    Even if you don’t think you have life insurance, a policy may have been taken out in your name. So is that good news? Probably not. Here’s a look at one of the craziest tax-avoidance schemes in U.S. history. It’s still legal and still in widespread use .
    P APER TRAIL
Not many people realized it at the time, but by the early 1990s it had become a common practice in many American corporations for the company to contact the estate of any employee who died and request a copy of the death certificate.
    It made no difference if the death was work related or not. The deceased didn’t even have to be a current employee—so what if they’d quit two years earlier, after only a few weeks on the job? The company wanted a copy of the death certificate just the same. Few companies bothered to explain why they needed the death certificates, and considering what they were up to, it’s no wonder they kept it a secret. Not many bereaved families had the presence of mind to ask; those few families who learned what was going on usually found out by accident.
    In the case of a banker named Dan Johnson, who died of brain cancer in 2008, that accident came when a letter addressed to Amegy Bank, his former employer, was damaged while being sorted at the post office. Johnson’s name was listed on the letter, and the post office mistakenly forwarded it to