Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader by Bathroom Readers’ Institute

yielding only one or two dollars’ worth of gold a day, and the men had heard about richer claims near the West Walker River, about 25 miles away. But they decided to stick around a little longer, probably until they made enough money to pay for the move.
    It takes water to sift gold out of sand and dirt, and the closest water source was a tiny spring that the men decided to dam up with some strange bluish sand they’d uncovered nearby. Almost on a whim, they tossed some of the odd sand into the rocker to see if it contained any gold. It was heavy and difficult to work with, but when they cleared it away they were stunned to see that the entire bottom of the rocker was covered in a layer of shimmering gold. Where Old Virginny had recovered gold by the ounce, O’Riley and McLaughlin were mining it by the pound .
    The term “taken aback” comes from sailing: a gust of wind can catch the sails and stop the ship.
RANCHO COMSTOCKO
    So why isn’t the Comstock Lode known as the O’Riley Lode or the McLaughlin Lode? Because later that same day, another miner, Henry “Old Pancake” Comstock, happened to ride by while the men were celebrating their good fortune. When Comstock sawthe gold, he hopped off his pony and told the two men that they were prospecting on land that he and a partner had already claimed for a ranch. In those days, you could claim unoccupied land for a ranch just as easily as you could stake a mining claim. Comstock told the “trespassers” that if they would let him and his partner, Emmanuel Penrod, become equal partners in the claim, he wouldn’t take them to court. Furthermore, if he and Penrod were given 100 feet of the claim to work by themselves, he’d even let them use the water from “his” stream.
DEAL OR NO DEAL
    Nearly 150 years have passed since then, and in all that time no record of a ranch claim by Comstock has ever been found. But O’Riley and McLaughlin didn’t know that, and in those days it was common to settle mining disputes quickly without resorting to lawsuits—why waste money on lawyers when nobody knew how long the gold would last? Even the best claims might peter out after a month or two.
    O’Riley and McLaughlin took the deal…and Comstock started getting credit for their discovery. Comstock “was the man who did all the heavy talking,” Dan DeQuille wrote in his 1876 book A History of The Big Bonanza . “He made himself so conspicuous on every occasion that he soon came to be considered not only the discoverer but almost the father of the lode. People began to speak of the vein as Comstock’s mine, Comstock’s lode…while the names of O’Riley and McLaughlin, the real discoverers, are seldom heard.”
THE BAD WITH THE GOOD
    Beneath the crumbly blue dirt was a firmer, compacted blue stone that yielded even more gold. On good days, the men pulled more than $1,000 worth of gold from the earth, more than 5½ pounds of gold a day. When the men hit a really rich patch, they might collect $150 worth in a single pan of dirt. The only frustration was the fact that the strange blue dirt clogged the rockers and other mining equipment terribly. “For weeks they let it go to waste,” DeQuille wrote, “throwing it anywhere to get it out of the way. They not only did not try to save it, but constantly cursed it. It was the great drawback.”
    Hey, who said life was fair? Part II of the story is on page 222 .
    First known phobia to be described: Hydrophobia, a fear of water, in the mid-1500s.

LAW AND ORDER: SPECIAL PANTS UNIT
    Why, yes—those are lobster tails in my pants. Why do you ask ?
    I n May 2008 , a liquor store manager in Fort Pierce, Florida, told a man with what newspaper accounts called “a very large bulge” in his pants to hand over whatever it was he had “down there.” The man reached into his pants, pulled out two bottles of Hennessy cognac, gave them to the manager…and then ran out the door with the other two bottles he still had in his pants. (He