Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Golden Plunger Awards by Bathroom Readers’ Institute Page B

Rascal. And each piece is a work of art that takes hours to create—and hours to earn. A pair of Yoropiko jeans costs anywhere from $475 (for plain denim with your choice of gems) to $995 (for embroidered denim) and up (for custom designs).

DISTRESSING THE ENVIRONMENT
    Raw denim and custom-made jeans may be extravagant, but recently a popular form of treating denim has come under fire for being environmentally unfriendly. Stonewashed jeans were really popular in the 1980s and 1990s, and many people still like them because the jeans are soft from the first wearing, look good, and can be customized with all sorts of frayed threads, holes, slashes, and worn bits. But some of the processes that make denim more comfortable for wearers are polluting land and rivers in central Mexico—specifically the Tehuacán valley, where more than 700 clothing manufacturers process jeans to sell to U.S. companies.
    Once called the “city of health,” Tehuacán used to be best
known for mineral springs. Today, toxic runoff from the denim plants has poisoned the area. The water in Tehuacán’s irrigation canals has turned blue and is so full of toxins that it burns seedlings and sterilizes farmland. And much of the dirt along the canal’s banks is an ashy gray.
    There are alternatives. Some smaller companies like Edun and Fair Indigo offer organic and fair-trade denim that’s processed in environmentally friendly ways.

FAVORITE FABRIC
    Today’s denim often contains Lycra and other fibers, but it’s typically an all-cotton fabric. The natural fiber and the strong weave make leftover denim useful for all sorts of things:
    • Recycled denim can be made into pencils—sure, they’re blue, but the lead is still charcoal gray.
    • Recycled blue jeans, known as “Cotton Batt,” have become a new eco-friendly choice for insulating homes. Cotton even has a better insulation value than fiberglass.
    • Crane’s, the famed stationery company, has been using denim scraps in its all-fabric paper for more than 200 years. It now even has a “Denim Blues” line.

FILLER
    At the BRI, we call these little extra tidbits at the end of articles “filler.” The Academy Awards has its own version: In the auditorium on Oscar night, the Academy enlists a few dozen “seat fillers”—volunteers whose job is to hang out in the wings during the four-hour ceremony, waiting for audience members to go the bathroom. Then the seat filler quietly runs in and occupies the vacant seat until its owner returns. The reason: Whenever the camera pans the audience, it must always appear to be a packed house. The seat fillers are under strict orders not to talk to or engage in any way with the movie stars they are sitting next to. (We now return you to your regularly scheduled Golden Plunger Awards.)

THE STATE OF THE ART AWARD
    Christo and Jeanne-Claude
    If your average person decided to take thousands of yards of fabric and drape them
over a well-known landmark, it might be seen as weird and intrusive. But
contemporary artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude combine determination
and lots of patience to make their visions work.
    GOOD COP, BAD COP
    Christo and Jeanne-Claude describe themselves as “environmental artists” because they take an environment and work with it to make art. Urban or rural, land- or water-based, Christo installations take every element of a place into account.
    For years, the artworks were signed and marketed under the name “Christo,” so people believed that he was the sole creator. Now, the pair refer to themselves as “the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude.” Christo Javacheff was born in Bulgaria on June 13, 1935—Jeanne-Claude was born on the same day in France. They met when Christo did a painting of Jeanne-Claude’s mother in 1958. Jeanne-Claude describes their collaboration as a “good cop, bad cop” dynamic—he focuses on the vision; she focuses on business logistics.
    Christo has vowed never to repeat himself. He won’t wrap