Uncle John’s Briefs (27 page)

Only the very wealthy can afford country club memberships. The price of joining a club costs the equivalent of about five years of a middle-class worker’s salary. The most prestigious clubs charge several million dollars. However, Japanese golfers view a membership as an investment as well as a status symbol—they can be bought, sold, transferred, and passed down. At the peak of the Japanese inflation crisis in the late 1980s, country club memberships accounted for roughly 10 percent of Japan’s gross domestic product.

LAND OF THE RISING GREENS FEES

It’s pricey, but Japanese golfers get a lot for their money. Courses are so meticulously manicured that it’s virtually impossible to lose a ball, even in the rough. Clubhouses are lavishly decorated with marble. Even daily fee-paying golfers are treated well, with access to saunas, baths, and high-end restaurants. Refreshing hot towels are provided at the 7th and 16th holes, and you can get a robot caddie to carry your gear.

Links are so crowded that playing nine holes can take up to three hours, but golfers are given a 45-minute lunch break after the front nine (in Japan, you’re assigned a tee time for each set of nine holes). And after the round, there is a traditional bath followed by drinks and coffee, while clothes and shoes are left to dry in special heated lockers.

Fewer than 50 pilgrims survived their first winter in America.

Some other notable golf hot spots (and cold spots) around the world:

•
ICELAND:
There are only 15 golf clubs in this tiny island nation, but the population is so small, the number of golf courses per capita is comparable to that of the United States. The Akureyri Golf Club is the northernmost course in the world. Each June it hosts the Arctic Open Golf Championship. The sun doesn’t completely set for six months of the year in arctic regions, so tee off is at midnight and play continues until 6 a.m. On the other side of the country, the Westman Island Golf Club is set inside a volcanic crater adjacent to the Atlantic Ocean. The bumpy lava formations and unrelenting ocean winds make for a challenging round of golf.

•
INDIA:
One of the first golf clubs outside of the British Isles—the Royal Calcutta—was established in India in 1829. The first national competition, the All-India Amateur Championship, was established in 1892, making it the world’s second-oldest open championship after the British Open. British golfers dominated the All-India until 1949, when Mohinder Bal became the first native-born Indian to win it.

•
AUSTRALIA:
Australians have golfed since the mid-1800s, when it was still a British colony. Today, there are plenty of elegant, highly manicured courses near the cities along the coast, but Australia also has huge expanses of largely uninhabited land in its interior. The Outback is mostly grass-free, hot desert, but that doesn’t stop course developers from building nine-hole courses of oiled sand. Natural hazards: grazing kangaroos, wombat holes, and snakes.

•
MALAYSIA:
Summer temperatures hover around 90 degrees. Golf is popular there, but how do golfers avoid the extreme heat and humidity? Night golf under high-powered floodlights.

•
IRAN:
In 1979 Iran’s pro-Western government was overthrown and replaced by a strict Muslim theocracy that viewed golf as a useless and decadent Western activity. Teheran’s once prestigious Imperial Golf Club quickly fell into disrepair; five holes have even been confiscated by the government for their real estate value. Golf is now starting to regain popularity, though, and one politician heads a program that provides funds and equipment to schools with golf programs. Golf is most popular among Iranian women, despite the requirement that on the course they be covered from head to toe and cannot play at the same time as men.

Scientific term for foul-smelling breath (worse than “bad” breath):
ozostomia
.

I’D LIKE TO THANK
THE ACADEMY...

Every year, Hollywood puts on the movie industry’s biggest party. But there’s more to the Academy Awards than sealed envelopes, gold statues, and acceptance speeches. Here are a few little-known facts about the Oscars
.

A
n Oscar isn’t really called an “Oscar.”
It’s not even officially called an Academy Award. The award’s full title is the Academy Award of Merit. The “Academy” refers to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, formed in 1927 by film-industry employees to arbitrate labor disputes, provide a forum for teaching movie-making techniques and innovations, and improve the industry’s image. In 1929, almost as an afterthought, it began giving out awards for achievement. Most people now associate the Academy only with the awards, but it also continues its other functions (except that it ended its involvement with labor disputes in 1937).

•
At the first ceremony, only 14 awards were given out. The original award categories were:
Actor, Actress, Art Direction, Cinematography, Directing (Comedy), Directing (Drama), Engineering Effects, Unique and Artistic Picture, Writing (Adaptation), Writing (Original), Writing (Title Writing), Outstanding Picture (which went to
Wings
), and two “special achievement” awards. The ceremony lasted 15 minutes; admission was $5.

•
The winners’ names were not always closely guarded secrets.
The 1929 ceremony was an unpretentious dinner in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Everyone already knew who had won; the results had been announced nearly three months earlier. The following year, the Academy gave the press the names of the winners ahead of time—on the condition that they wouldn’t print the results until after the ceremony. That tradition continued until 1939 when, during a heated race for Best Picture among heavyweight contenders such as
Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind
, and Mr.
Smith Goes to Washington
, the
Los Angeles Times
printed the name of the winner (
Gone With the Wind
) in its early evening edition—a few hours before the ceremony, ruining the suspense. Since then, the winners are revealed
only
at the ceremony.

Popular pizza topping in Brazil: green peas.

LET’S DANCE!

More origins of booty-shaking crazes. (For Part I, turn to page 53.)

T
HE TWIST
You can thank Dick Clark for this dance craze—as host of TV’s
American Bandstand
, he was always on the lookout for the next big fad. In 1959 he heard a little-known Hank Ballard b-side called “The Twist.” Clark loved the song and urged Ballard to perform it on
Bandstand
, but Ballard wasn’t interested. So Clark searched around Philadelphia (where the show was based) and found a part-time chicken plucker named Ernest Evans who was known for his ability to mimic popular singers. Before Evans could perform, however, Clark insisted he find a good stage name. Clark’s wife, Barbara, suggested modeling it after Fats Domino: “Fats” became “Chubby,” and “Domino” became “Checker.” So the newly christened Chubby Checker sang “The Twist” on
Bandstand
and it was an immediate hit. The single shot to #1, and
the
dance craze of the 1960s was born. So why was the Twist so popular? First, as a non-contact dance, it was novel and rebellious enough to appeal to teenagers, but safe enough for the conservative media. Second, the Twist is easy—even non-dancers (like Uncle John) could do it. “It’s like putting out a cigarette with both feet and wiping your bottom with a towel,” explained Checker.
Typecast:
“The Twist” turned Checker into a star. He followed it up with a string of successful dance songs (to this day, he’s the only recording artist to have had five albums in the Top 12 at the same time). Yet the song also took a toll on Checker’s artistic dreams. “In a way, ‘The Twist’ really ruined my life,” he lamented years later. “I was on my way to becoming a big nightclub performer, and ‘The Twist’ just wiped it out. It got so out of proportion. No one ever believes I have talent.”

THE WALTZ
Even people who can’t dance (like Uncle John) can recognize the familiar 1-2-3, 1-2-3 rhythm of the waltz. Although these days it’s associated with high society, when the waltz was introduced in European ballrooms in the early 1800s, it was shunned by “respect able” people. For one, the music came from peasant yodeling melodies of Austria and Bavaria. Worse yet: the close proximity of the two dance partners. Even poet Lord
Byron, a notorious rake, claimed that the “lewd grasp and lawless contact” of the waltz “does not leave much to mystery to the nuptial night.”

Two years after Jan and Dean’s “Dead Man’s Curve” became a hit, Jan Berry nearly died in a car accident three blocks from Dead Man’s Curve in Los Angeles.

Nevertheless, the waltz caught on and became the standard dance of the upper classes in Europe and the United States. Most of the credit for that goes to Austrian composer Johann Strauss. In the mid-1800s, he reworked the peasant melodies and turned them into layered compositions which were embraced by Viennese royalty. This made Strauss the “waltz king.” He toured Europe with his orchestra, taking the music (as well as the dance) to Germany, Poland, and Russia. It soon found its way to England, then the United States…and eventually into Earth’s orbit.
Revolver:
Perhaps the most wisely recognized waltz is Strauss’s 1867 work, “The Blue Danube”—it was so popular in Austria that it became the country’s unofficial anthem. The piece also became a staple of American pop culture when Stanley Kubrick used it in his 1969 film
2001: A Space Odyssey
to accompany the delicate dance of a passenger shuttle orbiting a space station as it prepares to dock—which makes sense, as the word “waltz” comes from the German
walzen
, meaning “to revolve.”

MORE WAYS TO SHAKE YOUR GROOVE THING

The Macarena:
The song by Los del Río about a sensuous Spanish woman took the U.S. by storm in 1996. VH1 called it the “#1 Greatest One-Hit Wonder of All Time.”
Hully Gully:
A popular line dance from the 1960s, popularized by the 1960 song “Hully Gully,” by the Olympics. John Belushi dances the hully gully in the 1980 film
The Blues Brothers
.

Electric Slide:
A disco line dance created by the famous disco dancer Ric Silver in 1976. It came from a song called “Electric Boogie,” written by Bunny Wailer (from Bob Marley’s band).
Charleston:
Though it’s associated with white “flappers” in speakeasies of the 1920s, the dance actually came from the song of the same name by African-American pianist James P. Johnson.
Achy-Breaky:
The 1992 song made Billy Ray Cyrus a country superstar and ushered in a new era of line dancing—not just in America, but all over Europe as well. And it’s still going strong today.
Limbo:
Created in Trinidad in the 1950s, the name comes from the word “limber,” which you must be in order to do this dance. It became a fad in 1962 thanks to Chubby Checker’s “Limbo Rock.”

TONGUE TWISTERS

Try to say these three times fast. And pay no attention to the person banging on the bathroom door, wondering what’s going on in there
.

W
ho washed Washington’s white woolens when Washington’s washerwoman went west?

L
esser leather never weathered wetter weather better.

S
have a cedar shingle thin.

W
hich wristwatches are Swiss wristwatches?

A
thin little boy picked six thick thistle sticks.

F
lee from fog to fight flu fast!

T
he bootblack bought the black boot back.

W
e surely shall see the sun shine soon.

M
iss Smith’s fish sauce shop seldom sells shellfish.

W
hich wicked witch wished which wicked wish?

I
slit the sheet, the sheet I slit, and on the slitted sheet I sit.

G
ive papa a cup of proper coffee in a copper coffee cup.

I
magine an imaginary menagerie manager managing an imaginary menagerie.

T
he epitome of femininity.

F
red fed Ted bread, and Ted fed Fred bread.

M
any an anemone sees an enemy.

A
ny noise annoys an oyster but a noisy noise annoys an oyster most.

Brooke Shields, Teri Garr, and John Travolta all appeared in 1970s Band-Aid commercials.

THE EARTH IS FLAT!

For centuries, scientists have been able to prove that the Earth is round, but that hasn’t stopped people from developing their own unique—and entertaining—theories about its shape
.

T
HE EARTH IS FLAT
Who Says So:
The International Flat Earth Research Society
What They Believe:
The world is a big flat disc, with the North Pole at the center. What is mistakenly believed to be the South Pole is actually a 150-foot-high mass of ice that forms a big square around the Earth-disc (the way an album cover makes a square around a record). People who think they’re sailing around the world are actually sailing in a circle on the surface of the disc.

Flat-Earthers believe the Bible must be interpreted literally. Passages like Revelation 7:1 and 20:8, which refer to “the four corners of the earth,” are all the proof they need.
History:
In 1849 an English “itinerant lecturer” named Samuel Birley Rowbotham resurrected the flat-Earth theory (which had been widely discredited by the eighth century). The flat-Earth movement grew sporadically over the next 70 years, finally peaking in the 1920s when Wilbur Glen Voliva organized a flat-Earth religious community with several thousand followers in Zion, Illinois. Voliva owned one of the country’s first 100,000-watt radio stations, and used it to preach the flat-Earth gospel to folks in the American Midwest. Today the movement lives on in Charles Johnson’s Flat Earth Society, which published
Flat Earth News
…until Johnson’s house burned down in 1995, incinerating the 3,500-person mailing list. No word on what he’s doing now.