Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (45 page)

From the prototype onward, poor design and poor quality control also meant that as many as 20 percent of the early rocket rounds had flaws. Some never ignited; others launched only after you cocked and fired the gun twice. If a rocket did fail to ignite on the second try, there was no way of telling whether it was genuinely dead…or a slow-burner that would suddenly ignite as you tried to remove it from the gun. The company’s own literature advised Gyrojet owners to remove dud rockets from the gun only “after a 10-second waiting period” if it didn’t launch on the second attempt. Wait 10 seconds before clearing and reloading your weapon? In a combat situation? When other people are
shooting at you
?

Even when the rocket round did ignite properly, there was no guarantee that it would even build up enough thrust to exit the barrel of the gun. Many rockets jammed in the barrel and flamed out. Of those that did manage to exit, some had flawed nozzles that caused them to travel in a circular, corkscrew path instead of flying straight to the target.

Any one of these flaws by itself could have meant the difference between life and death in a firefight. And the problem was made worse by the fact that the Gyrojet was both time-consuming and cumbersome to load. Most semiautomatic handguns have a clip that allows you to load eight or more bullets at the same time. Revolvers can be reloaded quickly using a device called a speed loader. The Gyrojet, on the other hand, required the user to feed individual bullets into the spring-loaded magazine one at a time, all the while taking care to keep a thumb pressed down on top of the inserted bullets. If the user’s thumb happened to slip, the spring popped the rockets up and out of the gun, almost like toast out of a toaster—another huge disadvantage in combat.

Even the Gyrojet’s strongest selling points, its high speed and power at great distances, worked against it. The Gyrojet rockets were designed to exceed the speed of sound, but as an accelerating object approaches the speed of sound, there is a great deal of turbulence that can deflect it from its course. This often caused Gyrojet rockets to miss distant targets entirely. In other words, the gun was too weak to be effective at close range and too inaccurate to be effective at long range.

When the Gyrojet hit store shelves in the mid-1960s, gun owners who were used to the heft of ordinary handguns thought it felt (and looked) like a toy gun. That didn’t stop MB Associates from charging $100 for it—as much as an ordinary revolver. And the rockets themselves sold for about $1.35 apiece, far more than ordinary bullets. The Gyrojet quickly developed a reputation as a gun that everyone wanted to shoot, just out of curiosity…but nobody wanted to own. Collectors with money to burn bought them for their novelty value, but shooters never took them seriously, and by the early 1970s they were gone.

If you were one of the few to buy a Gyrojet in the 1960s, you made a good investment: Today they range in value from $1,500 for the most common handgun models to $5,000 or more for the rarer carbine and rifle models. And if you still have some of the rockets lying around, think twice before you shoot them off—today those tiny $1.35 rockets are worth more than $100
each.

One of the most glamorous actresses of Hollywood’s Golden

Age, Kelly was a movie star for just four years: from 1952 to 1956. In that time, she appeared in such classics as
High Noon, Dial M For Murder, To Catch a Thief, High Society
, and
The Country Girl,
for which she won an Oscar. But in 1956, she married Prince Rainier of Monaco, the tiny but wealthy principality in the South of France, and became Princess Grace. Rainier thought appearing in movies was beneath a princess, so Kelly gave up her acting career. She never left the limelight, however, and remained a tabloid fixture until her death in a car accident in 1982.

Penn is best known for his starring roles in the two cult
Harold and Kumar
movies, and in 2007 he joined the cast of the popular TV medical drama
House.
But in an April 2009 episode, Penn’s character shocked audiences when he killed himself. The reason: Penn had decided to leave the show (and acting) for politics. He’d accepted a job in the Obama administration as associate director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, where he became the president’s liaison to Asian, Pacific Islander, and arts groups.

This British actress was one of the most acclaimed movie stars of the late 1960s and early 1970s, starring in controversial films (
Sunday Bloody Sunday)
, comedies (
A Touch of Class
), and dramas (
Women in Love).
She even won two Oscars for best actress. In the late 1980s, Jackson became concerned about the direction in which conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher was taking the country. So in 1992, Jackson gave up acting and ran for a seat in the House of Commons…and won. In Parliament she focused on transportation issues, earning an appointment as junior minister
of transportation in 1997. After unsuccessfully running for mayor of London in 2000, Jackson returned to the House of Commons, where she continues to serve as a member of Parliament.

Sherman became a teen idol with his role as an 1870s logger on the 1968–70 TV series
Here Come the Brides
. He parlayed the role into a successful singing career and earned six gold records for songs like “Easy Come, Easy Go” and “Little Woman.” But it was while filming an episode of the 1970s medical drama
Emergency!
in 1974 that Sherman realized what he really wanted to do: real-life emergency response. Since leaving acting, Sherman has been a volunteer Los Angeles police officer, a first-aid class instructor, a paramedic, and a deputy sheriff in San Bernardino County, California.

As a character actress, Thompson co-starred on several television dramas in the 1980s and 1990s, including
Falcon Crest
,
Babylon 5
, and
JAG
. In 1997 she landed a leading role as Detective Jill Kirk-endall on the hit series
NYPD Blue
. Then suddenly, at the end of her third season on the show in 2000, Thompson quit to follow a new career: TV journalism. And she did it the hard way, working her way up. She took a job as a reporter at a local Albuquerque, New Mexico, television station before moving on to
CNN Headline News
in 2001 and to Court TV in 2002.

Hart made her first film appearance in the 1956 Elvis Presley movie
Loving You
. It made her a star, and she appeared with Presley again the following year in
King Creole.
After starring in
The Pleasure of His Company
on Broadway in 1959, Hart returned to movies, making the teen hit
Where the Boys Are
, followed by
Come Fly With Me.
And that was it. In 1963, finding Hollywood “needlessly competitive and negative,” the 24-year-old Hart joined the Regina Laudis Abbey in Bethelehem, Connecticut, and became a nun. She eventually became the prioress (person in charge) of the convent. Bonus: Still a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Hart gets to vote for the Oscars each year. (She is the only member of AMPAS who is a nun.)

It’s not just, “Who had the most losses in a single season?” National Hockey League standings are calculated by points—two for a win, one for a tie, zero for a loss. So the season’s worst team is the one that racks up the fewest points. The all-time worst was the 1974–75 Washington Capitals, with 21 points. Their record: 8 wins, 5 ties, and 67 losses. Only once in NHL history has another team come close: the 1980–81 Winnipeg Jets, who won 9 games and lost 57 (but racked up a relatively impressive 14 ties).

In the 1970s, the NFL played a 14-game season. In 1976, its first year in existence, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers went 0-14 and became the first team ever to lose every game of the season. The next season, they weren’t much better at 2–12. The following year the NFL went to a 16-game schedule, and it took 30 more years for a team to lose every single one of them: the Detroit Lions, who achieved a “perfect” 0–16 record in 2008.

Only once in a full NBA season has a team won fewer than 10 games—the 1972–73 Philadelphia 76ers, who finished the season with a 9–73 record. That dismal year included three of the longest losing streaks in NBA history. The Sixers opened the year with a 14-game losing streak, had a 20-game losing streak midseason (a record at the time), and ended the season by losing 13 consecutive games.

Prairie View A&M University’s football team, the Panthers, won five national titles in the 1950s and ’60s. But between 1990 and
’98, they lost 80 straight games, the worst losing streak ever for a college team. And the worst year of the streak was 1991, in which the Panthers’ opponents scored an average of 56 points per game, while PVAMU scored 48 points…for the entire season. PVAMU did win the final game of the 1998 season, and the following season they doubled their wins—finishing with a record of 2-9.

The New York Mets joined the National League in 1962. While first-year teams normally don’t do well, the rookie Mets set a new standard: 40–122. They finished more than 60 games behind the pennant-winning San Francisco Giants. The record was nearly toppled in 2003 when the Detroit Tigers amassed a 43–119 record.

Generally speaking, the more academically prestigious a college is, the worse its sports teams are. (Alumni contributions go to research labs, not football arenas.) Case in point: the well-funded CalTech (California Institute of Technology). The CalTech Beavers men’s basketball team plays in the NCAA’s Division III, and over 11 years from 1996 to 2007, they didn’t win a single game. That’s a 207-game losing streak, the longest in North American history in any sport, collegiate or otherwise.

Comparing every NFL, NHL, NBA, and MLB team, the one with the worst overall lifetime record is the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers. Including their previous incarnations as the Buffalo Braves (1970–78) and the San Diego Clippers (1978–84), there are only 3 seasons out of 40 in which they have won more games than they lost. The Clippers’ all-time record: 1,146 wins and 2,020 losses, for a won-lost percentage of .362. No other pro team even dips below .400.

Luck never gives; it only lends.

The study of mushrooms is called
mycology
. Here’s more mushy trivia.