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

chicken is stuffed with the boiled egg and coriander, then stuffed into the lamb, which is stuffed into the goat, which is stuffed into the camel. The camel is then spiked with garlic, brushed with butter, and roasted over an open fire. The finished dish is placed at the center of the table. Pieces of camel, goat, lamb, and chicken are pulled off and eaten with the hands. No utensils are required. Serves 100 to 150 guests.
    SCHLAGSCHOCKEN. The recipe for this dessert from Zurich, Switzerland, calls for 12 pounds of cream, sugar, eggs, honey, and chocolate, all reduced down into a single four-inch square of Schlagschocken. Warning: The Swiss are used to this rich treat, but visitors have been known to pass out from eating a single serving.
    CURRIED RAT. On your next trip to Vietnam, try this local delicacy. Severe flooding in 2000 nearly wiped out the rat population in rice fields along the Mekong River, but they’re back on the menu thanks to their amazingly fast reproductive rate. Rat catchers make about $4 a day selling them to restaurants. Choice rat meat goes for $1.70 per kilo ($.77 per pound). Don’t like curry? Try fried rat, rat on the grill, or rat sour soup.
    IGUANA EGGS. A Central American favorite. Boil the eggs for 10 minutes, then sun-dry them. The result is a slightly rubbery egg with a cheeselike flavor. How do you get iguana eggs? Catch a pregnant female iguana, slit the abdomen open with a sharp knife, and gently remove the eggs. Then rub some ashes into the wound, sew it up with needle and thread, and let the iguana go. There’s a good chance you’ll see her again next year for another meal.
    BIRD’S NEST SOUP. Have you seen this on a menu in some fancy Chinese restaurant? Forget it. Real bird’s nest soup is made from bird spit—the gooey, stringy saliva that Chinese swiftlets use to attach their nests to the walls of caves. The hardened saliva is prized for its medicinal—and aphrodisiac—properties, which makes it very expensive. The license fee to harvest one cave: $100,000. The soup is a simple chicken broth, with one good dollop of bird spit in it.
Fred Astaire’s feet were insured for $650,000.

FLYING FLOPS
    Okay, so the last thing you want to read about is airplane trouble. But it’s better to read about it in the bathroom than in an airplane. What? You took this book with you on a flight to Hawaii? Oh, well, our advice: skip this article for now and read it when you’re back on solid porcelain .
    C APRONI CA-60 TRANSAEREO (1921)
If a plane with two wings is called a biplane, and a plane with three wings is called a triplane, what do you call a plane with nine wings? A very bad idea.
    Count Gianni Caproni was an Italian nobleman who owned an airplane factory and built bombers for the Italian Air Force in 1914 and 1915. Yet for some reason, when he set out to build a seaplane that could fly from Italy all the way to New York, he ignored all of his practical experience. Instead of building a plane that could land on water, he took a houseboat and added wings—nine wings (three in the front, three in the middle and three in the back)—and eight engines (four on the front wings to pull the plane, and four on the back wings to push it).
    On March 4, 1921, his test pilot fired up the engines, taxied across Lake Maggiore, and took off…sort of.
    The craft got about 60 feet into the air, then suddenly nose-dived, broke into pieces, and slammed into the lake. The pilot survived, but Count Caproni’s image did not. “His reputation for commercial aircraft thoroughly blackened,” Bill Yenne writes in The World’s Worst Aircraft, “ Caproni skulked away into oblivion.”
    THE BREWSTER BUFFALO
    In the 1930s, the U.S. Navy checked out prospective new fighter planes by putting them through a rigorous test flight. A test pilot would fly the prototype to its maximum altitude and then take it into a long, steep dive at full speed. If the pilot could pull out of the dive without ripping the