Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (55 page)

In 2009 the editors of the
Oxford Junior Dictionary
decided to remove a few hundred words from their newest edition to make room for new ones. Out: “bishop,” “disciple,” “pew,” “devil,” “cheetah,” “porcupine,” “almond,” and “fern.” In: “blog,” “MP3 player,” “endangered,” “tolerant,” and “negotiate.” Conservation groups and religious advocates, not to mention linguists, were upset by the replacements. Defending the changes, Vineeta Gupta, the head of children’s dictionaries at Oxford University Press, said, “We are limited by how big the dictionary can be. Little hands must be able to handle it.” He also maintained that the kids’ dictionaries must reflect the lexicon of the times. “The decision to remove nature words is due to the reduced presence of nature in children’s lives,” he said. And the religious omissions? “People don’t go to church as often as before.”

In 2009 a man was hunting for geese outside the Swedish village of Hökerum and took aim at one a few dozen yards away. He shot and missed, but the bullet kept going. And going. And going. It traveled nearly a mile, over a lake, into a cottage, past the three people who lived in the cottage, and into the outhouse, where it struck and destroyed the toilet seat. The angry homeowners called police, who arrested the hunter on charges of “endangering human life.”

A man was pulling up his pants after using the toilet at a Center-ville, Utah, Carl’s Jr. restaurant when the gun he was carrying fell out of its holster and hit the floor. The gun went off, which instantly shattered the toilet (no one was harmed). Criminal charges weren’t filed, but the Carl’s Jr. staff decided to hold a mock funeral for the toilet, which they named “John.” Bottles of John’s favorite toilet cleanser (Kaboom Bowl Blaster) were given away to mourners. “He was survived by the men’s urinal and wash sink,” restaurant manager Christian Martinez said.

In 2009 Allison Berry was flushing the toilet in the Black Bear Diner in Phoenix, Arizona, when her seven-carat $70,000 wedding ring slipped off her finger, fell into the bowl, and went down the drain. The diner called the city, who sent workers to open a sewer line outside the restaurant. They flushed the toilet continuously, hoping the ring would be forced out. It didn’t work, so they called Mr. Rooter, a local plumbing service. Mr. Rooter’s Mike Roberts snaked a miniature video camera with an attached infrared light into the pipe, where he found the ring in the plumbing system just a few feet below the bathroom. After five hours of searching, and then 90 minutes of jackhammering and pipe removal—at a cost of $6,500—Berry was finally reunited with her ring.

 

THE
TITANIC
SLIDE.
Measuring 33’ high and 50’ long, this inflatable slide (available for party rentals) depicts the doomed ship’s aft end sticking up out of the water. Just like the passengers who slid to their deaths, kids can slide into…fun. From the description: “Adding to the realism are the famed triple-screw propellers and rudder. One could almost believe the ship is sinking! Who will survive the slide down?”

DALLAS COWBOYS CHEERLEADER BARBIE.
Named “Worst Toy of the Year” in 2009 by the Boston consumer advocacy group Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. Their reason: Even though this Barbie doll was rated for children as young as six years old, “She comes with the shortest of short shorts, stiletto boots, and a revealing halter top.”

GOD*JESUS.
A plastic robot from Japan in the 1980s. It had glowing red eyes and held up a big cross. But was it a religious toy? Not exactly—the robot was more of a fortune-teller: It answered yes-or-no questions just like a Magic 8-Ball.

THE
SWEENEY TODD
RAZOR.
“Your friends will think you’re really sharp when you flash this authentic prop replica of the murderous singing barber’s straight razor! Fashioned from real metal, the realistic reproduction is intricately detailed and arrives in a red-velour, drawstring pouch, ready for more musical mayhem in your hands!”

A SCARY THING HAPPENED
.
This coloring book, designed to help kids deal with disasters, used to be available for download on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Web site but was removed in 2009. Why? Because parents complained about the disturbing drawings—tornadoes ripping houses apart, planes crashing into burning buildings—as well as the morbid instruc-tions‚ such as, “Draw a picture of yourself before the disaster.”

Tap dance is one of the true American art forms. It combines elements of the Irish jig and English clog dances with the step dancing and rhythmic drumming of West Africans, brought to the American colonies as slaves. Here are the elements that led to the development of tap dancing as we know it today.

•
Drumming.
It was actually a form of direct communication (like Morse code), which amounted to secret messages sent among slaves—and a way to subjugate authority. Result: Most plantation owners had banned drumming by the 1750s, forcing the slaves to turn to other forms of percussion, such as beating out rhythms with hands, feet, and even bones. Over generations the “language” of drumming was lost, and the rhythmic beating grew to be more about music and entertainment—both for the slaves and for the plantation owners, who taught the slaves clog dances and jigs to go along with the percussion.

•
Buck-and-Wing.
The most popular form of entertainment in the U.S. in the 1840s was the minstrel show. White performers in “blackface” makeup sang songs, performed comedy sketches, and spoke in “Negro” dialects, all in a crude parody of black people. Parodying black dance was also included, especially one called “buck-and-wing”—a slow, shuffling dance in which balance is shifted from the heel to the tip of the foot, which is emphatically and loudly tapped on the ground. After the Civil War, as black performers joined minstrel shows, buck-and-wing was developed into a precise, lightning-fast dance, with the best dancers tapping their toes and heels many times a second. Also gaining popularity in minstrel shows: challenge dances, in which two performers tried to outdo each other with faster steps and more-intricate moves.

•
Soft Shoe.
By the early 1900s, “vaudeville” variety shows were the dominant entertainment across the United States, and dance was part of it. In addition to buck-and-wing, performed in wooden-soled
shoes, a slower, smoother style called “soft shoe” developed, performed in shoes with leather soles. Eventually the two styles blended, and to make the tapping sound more prominent, around 1920 dancers started to nail blocks of cheap metal to the heels of their shoes, marking the invention of metal taps and the birth of modern tap dancing. Perhaps the best challenge dancer of all was Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who never lost a face-off on the black vaudeville circuit. (He wouldn’t get to perform before a white audience until he was 50 years old, in the film
Blackbirds of 1928.
)

•
Flash.
As jazz music took hold in the 1920s, jazz tap dance grew with it. The footwork was fast and worked with the complex syncopated rhythms of jazz. Broadway shows began to incorporate chorus lines doing complicated tap routines, and a style of acrobatic tap dancing called “flash” became popular. Most notable “flash” dancers: the Nicholas Brothers, who jumped from platforms, leaped into the air, slid down ramps, and just kept tapping.

•
Tap in the movies.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, tap reached its widest audience yet. Director Busby Berkeley’s lavish musicals (such as
42nd Street
and
Footlight Parade
) featured hordes of showgirls tap dancing in complicated patterns. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers brought another kind of tap dance to audiences with films like
Top Hat
,
Swing Time
, and
Shall We Dance
. They had glamour, grace, and an elegance that made them the most popular dancing pair in movie history. Secret weapon: a stationary camera filming each dance number in a (usually) single unbroken shot while keeping the dancers in full view in the frame. This made it possible for fans to focus on the perfection of the dancing.

• Decline…and comeback.
By the 1960s, tap’s popularity had waned, and many well-known dancers left it entirely. But it found a new audience with the release of the documentary film
No Maps on My Taps
(1979)
,
followed by the hit Broadway musical
Sophisticated Ladies
(1981), which starred the best-known modern tap dancer (and tap advocate), 35-year-old Gregory Hines. Other tap films:
The Cotton Club
(1984)
, A Chorus Line
(1985)
,
and
Tap
(1989)
,
starring Hines, Sammy Davis Jr., and 16-year-old Savion Glover, who fused tap with urban dance forms. He became a sensation with the 1996 Broadway musical
Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk.
Hines called him not just a good tap dancer but the
best
tap dancer who’s ever lived.

 

On the third floor of the Philadelphia Free Library
is a glass case displaying a stuffed crow. It’s a raven, to be precise—the very bird considered by many scholars to have been the inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe’s classic poem “The Raven.” How this stuffed bird came to inspire Poe’s poetry lies in the life and work of another great 19th century writer. Charles Dickens had a talking raven named Grip as a pet. The bird delighted his family and friends with pronouncements like, “Keep up your spirit!” “Never say die!” and “Polly, put the kettle on, we’ll all have tea!” Grip died in 1841 after eating lead paint off a wall, an event Dickens recounted in a letter to a friend: “On the clock striking twelve he appeared slightly agitated, but soon recovered, stopped to bark, staggered, exclaimed, ‘Halloa, old girl!’ and died.”

Dickens had the bird stuffed and set in a glass case.
His novel
Barnaby Rudge
, published later that year, featured a talking raven named Grip. When the bird first appears in the book, someone asks, “What was that tapping at the door?” Someone else answers, “’Tis someone knocking softly at the shutter.” Poe was working as a reviewer for
Graham’s Magazine
when
Barnaby Rudge
was printed in the United States. His review was favorable, except for one major flaw: the talking raven. Poe felt it could have been more “prophetically heard in the course of the drama.” Four years later Poe published his famous poem, with its lines “Suddenly there came a tapping…at my chamber door,” and “Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.’ ” The poem was an immediate success and secured Poe’s lasting reputation in American literature.

As for Grip, after Dickens’ death the bird and case
were sold at auction (the bird went for $210; the letter describing its death for $385), eventually ending up in the collection of Col. Richard Gimbel, the world’s foremost collector of Poe memorabilia. By then Grip’s association with Poe’s poem had been well established by scholars. In 1971 Gimbel’s entire collection, including the bird, was donated to the Philadelphia Library, where you can still see it today in the Rare Book department.

If you used a computer program to learn to type in the past 20 years, you probably used
Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.
It’s one of the bestselling instructional software titles ever, with more than five million copies sold since 1987. But the professorial-looking woman who appears on the box, it turns out, isn’t typing wizard Mavis Beacon. Beacon isn’t even a real person. The attractive woman in the photo is former fashion model Renee Les-perance. In 1985 Les Crane, chairman of Software Toolworks, the educational software company behind the program, spotted Les-perance in a store in Beverly Hills and hired her to “be” Mavis Beacon. The marketing department created the name—Mavis, in honor of singer Mavis Staples, and Beacon, as in a guiding light.

In 2004 GEICO insurance hired the Martin Agency, which had created the GEICO Gecko, to come up with a new ad campaign to direct customers to its Web site. The agency’s writers built on the idea that the Web site was so user-friendly, “even a caveman can do it.” The first ad depicted a TV-commercial shoot: An actor says the catchphrase, then the boom microphone operator—an actual caveman—storms off the set, shouting, “Not cool!” In the second ad, a GEICO rep takes two cavemen out to dinner to apologize. The cavemen are dressed in tennis whites and ordering “roast duck with mango salsa,” the joke being that they aren’t dumb and primitive, they’re Yuppies. By 2007 dozens of Caveman commercials had aired and were so popular that ABC turned the concept into a sitcom called
Cavemen.
The show wasn’t as popular—it lasted only six episodes.