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

What’s the difference between a phone booth and a bathroom? (If you don’t know, please don’t use our phone booth. )
    O VER THE HUMP
Next time you find yourself in rural India and need to phone home, don’t bother looking for a phone booth; there are none—the cost of laying telephone cable in rural areas is prohibitive. Yet there are millions of potential customers, so enterprising telecommunications companies have to be creative. Enter Shyam Telelink. The solution: They own 200 mobile phones. Every day they send the phones out into the back country… mounted on camels. Customers say the service is very user-friendly. Cost: 2 cents a call.
    DIAL-A-DOLPHIN
    Stressed out and stuck in traffic with only your cell phone to keep you company? Call a dolphin. As you listen to their underwater clicks and whistles, your stress will disappear. At least that’s what scientists at Ireland’s Dolphin and Wildlife Foundation hope will happen once they’ve installed underwater microphones in the Shannon estuary, where dolphins reside year round. They’re working with telecom giant Vodaphone to make it possible for cell phone users worldwide to “reach out and touch” the dolphins.
    Some kinks still need to be worked out, though—dolphins use a wide frequency band to communicate…most of which is beyond the human range of hearing.
    CALL ME STUPID
    Michael LaRock, a thief who had been on the run for over a year, called the police in Ticonderoga, New York, to boast that he would never be caught. Apparently it didn’t occur to him that the police might have caller I.D. The cops tracked the call to Auburn, Georgia, and quickly contacted the local police. While Officer Dan Charlton in New York was talking to LaRock on the phone, he heard the doorbell ring in the background. The next thing he heard was the Georgia police coming through the door to arrest the thief…right in his own home.
Most widely eaten fish in the world: herring.

SPACE, INC.
To most people, the stars represent the infinite cosmos. To some advertisers, they represent infinite opportunity—or rather, product placement heaven .
    L OOK! UP IN THE SKY!
Companies have been trying to commercialize space since the 1960s. But they took one giant step in 1993 when a Georgia-based company called Space Marketing, Inc. floated the idea of sending mile-long billboards into orbit. The Mylar billboards were designed to stay aloft for 30 days and project images half the size of a full moon to potential customers down on Earth. Fortunately, it never happened. Congress outlawed the billboards later that year, as Massachusetts Congressman Edward Markey raised the specter of every sunrise and sunset beaming down “the logo of Coke or G.M. or the Marlboro man, turning our morning and evening skies into the moral equivalent of the side of a bus.”
    While our skies seem safe from advertising for the moment, they may not stay that way. Federal regulations prohibit federal employees—astronauts included—from endorsing products, but American companies have found creative ways to finesse their own nation’s rules. And the cash-poor Russians have no such inhibitions. In fact, they’ve thrown the doors wide open to advertisers in order to help fund their space ventures. A brief chronology:
    FISHER SPACE PEN (1968) Fisher was trying to build a better ballpoint when it invented a cartridge that used pressurized nitrogen instead of gravity to feed ink to the pen point. Two years later, NASA thought the pens would be perfect for taking notes in zero gravity and sent some along on the Apollo 7 mission. The pens, renamed AG-7 Space Pens, became standard equipment on both American and Russian flights. Seizing a marketing opportunity, in 1998 Fisher peddled their pens during a live telecast from the Russian space station Mir to home shopping network QVC.
    THE COKE/PEPSI CHALLENGER (1985) Among the many scientific experiments carried out on 1985’s STS-51F Challenger mission was one NASA