Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd by Bathroom Readers’ Institute Read Free Book Online

a McDonald’s restaurant in Roodepoort, South Africa, was turned in to police by her employees because of the contents of the restaurant’s freezer: a six-year-old boy. The child had come to McDonald’s begging for food when the angry manager grabbed him and threw him into the walk-in. She left him there, without shoes or a shirt, for about 10 minutes. As soon as the door was opened, the boy ran away—shivering, according to news accounts. The manager was suspended for two weeks.
MEMBERS ONLY
    If you go to the Guolizhuang restaurant in Beijing, China, there’s a good chance you’ll find a variety of animal “private parts” in their freezer. The restaurant specializes in dishes made from the odd culinary choice, the BBC reported in 2006, and it’s a popular place too. The male organs of sheep, horse, ox, and seal are all good for circulation, says the restaurant’s “staff nutritionist,” adding that donkey “privates” are good for the skin, and snake “privates” are the cure for impotence.
ON SECOND THOUGHT, LET’S EAT IN
    In 1996 a crew was sent to repossess equipment from a Middle-Eastern restaurant in Brussels, Belgium, called the Baalbeck when the restaurant owners failed to make their loan payments on time. They found a human hand in a freezer. A subsequent search by police uncovered the remains of three human bodies in the restaurant’s other two freezers. Their investigation found that the bodies were just being hidden—and weren’t intended for consumption. (Three years later three men were convicted of the murders and imprisoned.)
    Brazil produced a coffee-scented postage stamp in 2001.

THE WEIRDEST GRAVE
IN THE WEST
    Here’s the story behind one of the most peculiar (and most popular) grave sites in the entire United States. More than 60 years after it was completed, it still attracts tens of thousands of visitors a year.
    F ORBIDDEN LOVE
    In the mid-1870s, a college student named John Davis was forced to drop out of Urania College in Kentucky after his parents died and he was unable to pay the tuition. He became an itinerant laborer, taking work wherever he could find it, and in 1879 he signed on as a farmhand for Tom Hart, a wealthy landowner in tiny Hiawatha, Kansas. Davis was a good worker, but that didn’t count for much when the penniless lad fell in love with Sarah Hart, the boss’s daughter. When the two announced their plans to marry, Mr. and Mrs. Hart, furious that Sarah would marry so far beneath her station, disowned her.
MOVING UP
    Ever heard the expression “living well is the best revenge”? John and Sarah got back at the Harts by becoming one of the most prosperous couples in Hiawatha, though it took them a lifetime to do it. After scraping together enough money to buy a 260-acre farm, they managed it so wisely that they were able to use the profits to buy a second farm, which also did well. Then, after 35 years of living in the country, the childless couple moved to a stately mansion on one of Hiawatha’s best streets. They were still living there in 1930, after more than 50 years of marriage, when Sarah died from a stroke.
    At first John commissioned a modest headstone for Sarah in Hiawatha’s Mount Hope Cemetery, but soon decided it wasn’t enough. He’d never forgotten how Sarah’s family had spurned them when they had nothing; now that they were more prosperous than the Hart clan, he decided that he and Sarah should be laid to rest in the nicest, most expensive memorial in town.
    A third of all pet owners admit to having more photos of their pet than of their spouse.
EDIFICE COMPLEX
    Davis was friends with a local tombstone salesman named Horace England, and together the two men designed a memorial consisting of life-size marble statues of John and Sarah as they looked on their 50th wedding anniversary. The statues would stand at the foot of the graves and face the headstones; the cemetery plot would also be protected from the elements by a 50-ton marble canopy