Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader (60 page)

Job
(noun). A staged loss.

Post
(verb). Run someone into the ringpost.

Hardway juice
(noun). Blood from an unintentional injury.

Heat
(noun). The level of the crowd's enthusiasm for a fight.

Pop
(noun or verb). A sudden rise in the heat of the crowd, such as when a popular wrestler makes his entrance.

Bump
(noun). A fall or other move that results in the wrestler falling out of the ring.

Jobber
(noun). A wrestler who does a job—he's hired to lose to the featured wrestler. Also known as redshirts or PLs, short for “professional losers.”

Clean job
(noun). A staged loss that doesn't involve illegal wrestling moves.

Screw-job
(noun). An ending that isn't clean—someone, usually the heel, wins by cheating.

Shoot
(noun). The opposite of a job—one wrestler really is trying to hurt another.

Some scientists think that after a nuclear holocaust, bees might become the predominant species on Earth. True? We hope we never find out, but look at some of the astonishing things bees can do
.

Studies show that bees are far more complex than you might think, with a sophisticated system of communication. They report the location of food sources to other bees using a kind of waggling dance. The dances always show the direction of the food in relationship to a reference point—the sun.

In 1919 an Austrian zoologist named Karl von Frisch became one of the first people to study and understand the dancing language of bees. In a series of trials, he found that if the bee's view of the sun was entirely blocked by artificial means, the dances became disoriented. If the view of the sky was replaced with a mirror that reflected the sky's scenery backward, the dances were reoriented to the sun's reflection. When von Frisch moved the hive into a darkened room and provided only the light of a flashlight, the dances were oriented to that artificial sun. Bees raised indoors with only a stationary electric light to guide them became hopelessly lost when their hive was moved outdoors under a constantly moving sun.

Popular theory once held that bees could see only in black and white. Von Frisch designed an experiment to test this. First he trained bees to feed at a clear glass container full of sugar water located on a brightly colored card. Then, when the bees left to return to their hive, an array of empty glasses was set out on cards of many different colors, as well as cards that were various shades of gray. Would the returning bees be able to distinguish the container that was sitting on the correct color, or would they be confused and go to the wrong dish? Over and over the bees returned without hesitation to the correct color, proving that they see in
color. (The only exception was when the sugar water sat on a red card. Bees would often go to a dark gray card instead, showing that they are unable to distinguish the color red.)

How do they do it? In a test to see whether they could distinguish shades of gray, the experimenter was surprised to find that bees were able to differentiate between two gray cards that looked absolutely identical to him. He eventually discovered that different companies manufactured the cards, and one reflected more ultraviolet light than the other—an important visual clue for a bee. Think of this: If bees were color-blind, flowers would not be so colorful.

One experiment testing the hearing of bees involved rigging a feeding station with an electrical current. A tone sounded three seconds before an electrified current was passed through the station. A different tone sounded when the current stopped, and would sound again periodically until the juice was turned back on. The bees soon learned the meaning of both sounds. They ignored the “safe” noise and reacted immediately to the “warning” noise.

Princeton University ethologist (animal behavior specialist) James Gould, one of the world's foremost authorities on bee behavior, performed an experiment in which he placed a source of food next to a beehive. Once the bees discovered it, he moved it 164 feet (50 meters) away to see how long it would take the bees to relocate the supply. After only one minute, they found the food. Gould then moved it another 164 feet, and again the bees tracked it down again in less than a minute. Every time Gould moved the food another 164 feet, the bees found it without delay. Then he noticed that the bees were flying on to the next station before he had even moved the food.

In the next experiment, Gould placed a bowl of sugar water near a beehive and then, after it had been discovered by the bees, started moving it. Every few minutes, he moved the dish, but each move was four times longer than the previous move. He moved it 1 inch, then 4 inches, then 16 inches, and so on. Soon he was moving the dish more than 100 feet in a single jump. Amazingly,
the bees soon caught on…and were waiting for him when he got there.

Bees like the nectar of the buckwheat flower, which exudes nectar in the morning. Bees know this and visit the flowers only during the morning hours. This led scientists to wonder if bees had a built-in sense of time, so they did some experiments. In the first experiment, they put out a bowl of sugar water from 10:00 a.m. to noon every day. After only a few days, the bees learned exactly what hours to come for the food and didn't waste time coming early or late.

So next time you're at a picnic and are tempted to swat a curious bee, remember how astonishing the honeybee is and leave it…bee.

• Honeybees are not native to North America. They were introduced here from Europe in the 1600s by the Puritans.

• Different bees have different dialects. A German bee cannot understand an Italian bee.

• Honey never spoils. In fact, honey placed in tombs in Southampton, England, over 400 years ago was still good when the tombs were opened.

• A typical American consumes about a pound of honey per year. A typical worker bee lives for one month and in that time collects enough nectar to make about one-twelfth a teaspoon of honey.

• Bees use ultraviolet vision—a specialized vision that allows them to see which flowers have the largest amounts of nectar.

• Honey comes in different colors and flavors—there are more than 300 unique kinds of honey in the United States alone. Why? Honey is made from diverse flower sources—clover, eucalyptus, or orange blossom, for example—and soil chemistry and honeycomb quality also influence how it tastes and looks.

• Another experiment: Will bees feed from water that's been artificially sweetened with Sweet 'N' Low? No.

Disasters often bring out the best in people. At 5:13 a.m., April 18, 1906, an earthquake rocked San Francisco (see page 45). For the next four days, fire ravaged the city. City fathers, the army, police, and firefighters all worked together to put the fires out. But the city might not have survived without the extraordinary efforts of ordinary people who stepped up and helped out. Here are some of their stories
.

T
he
Post Office
remained standing after the quake but was soon threatened by the growing blaze. Many brave postal workers risked their lives by beating out the smaller fires with wet mail sacks. As soon as the danger was past, they fervently began sorting the tons of mail city residents needed to get out to worried relatives. Survivors scribbled messages on boards, newspapers, even shirts, and as long as it had a legible address, it was delivered—no stamp needed.

The Western Union lines were down, but the Postal Telegraph office managed to stay open for business, providing a link of communication with the outside world.

• Of the city's five newspapers, one, the
Daily News
, actually managed to put out an edition Wednesday afternoon. The other four newspapers, long bitter rivals, joined forces with the
Daily News
to put out a combined issue on Thursday. The editors never bothered to ask permission of the owners, knowing it would be denied. The most important task at that moment was to get out the information that citizens needed to find food, shelter, services, and loved ones.

•
The
Southern Pacific Railroad Station
depot was saved by brave men with one pumper, a single stretch of hose, some wet gunny sacks, and a few buckets. Volunteers carried water from the bay three blocks away. Through this depot in the next few days passed millions of tons of food, blankets, clothing, and medical supplies—as well as 300,000 refugees fleeing the city. All traveled free of charge.

•
The
San Francisco Mint
was built of steel and concrete with metal windows. It was fireproof on the outside, but the rampaging fires blew out the windows and set fires inside. Firemen and employees frantically hauled water from a cistern to put out fires in interior woodwork and on the tarpaper roof. Seven hours later, the mint—and all the money inside—was safe.

•
The
Hopkins Art Institute
contained thousands of dollars worth of paintings and statues. Throughout Wednesday, teachers and students removed hundreds of pictures to the lawn, where they were carried in wheelbarrows, wagons, and on shoulders to safe spots around the city. Navy men arrived to help Wednesday night, and a young lieutenant used his service pistol to encourage other folks from the passing crowds to assist.

• Bank owner Amadeo Giannini
walked 17 miles to inspect the damage of his livelihood, the Bank of Italy. When he arrived, the fire was approaching fast. His clerks swore the fire would never reach that far, but Giannini disagreed. He loaded all the bank's funds into two wagons and hauled them to his house, where he hid the money behind his fireplace. When the fires were out, Giannini hauled the money to a new location in the financial district. Giannini's bank later expanded to become one of the largest in the nation—the Bank of America. Another bank president,
Charles Crocker
, had workers load all of his bank's cash into sacks, stack them in a wagon, and take it to the docks. Then he put the money on a boat, which took it out to the middle of San Francisco Bay until all the fires were out. So why is this important? It meant that survivors would be able to withdraw much-needed funds.

• Alice Eastwood
made her way downtown to the California Academy of Sciences. She was the curator of botany and managed to save many treasured plants while her own home burned to the ground. She could have saved her own possessions, but decided it was easier for her to buy new furniture than to replace the botanical specimans. All she had left after the fire was the dress she wore.

• The Ultimate Sacrifice:
Police Sergeant Behan saved much of the city's paperwork by wetting it down with beer collected from nearby stores.

We told you about time capsules on page 331. When you see
Star Wars
or
Star Trek
you probably think space travel is way off in the future. You're wrong—we're already out there. Here's some information about our time capsule in outer space
.

The Voyager mission continues. Launched in 1977, the twin Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft will soon leave our solar system and become emissaries from Earth. NASA placed a message aboard Voyagers 1 and 2, a time capsule intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials.

The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record—a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. A committee led by Dr. Carl Sagan of Cornell University assembled:

• 115 images

• A variety of natural sounds

• Musical selections from different cultures and eras

• Spoken greetings from Earth-people in 55 languages—beginning with Akkadian, spoken in Sumer about 6,000 years ago, and ending with Wu, a modern Chinese dialect.

Each record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, together with a cartridge and a needle. Instructions, in symbolic language, explain the origin of the spacecraft and indicate how the record is to be played. The images are encoded in analog form. The remainder of the record is in audio, designed to be played at 16⅔ revolutions per minute.