Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (76 page)

 

•
“Waterfalls,” by TLC.
The song is about the dangers of ignoring consequences. Group member Lisa Lopes had to record her mid-song rap from a prison cell…where she was being held for ignoring the consequences of setting her boyfriend’s house on fire.

 

•
“You Were Meant For Me,” by Jewel.
First released in 1995 as a more up-tempo country rock song with prominent electric guitar,
the song bombed. Jewel re-recorded it as an acoustic ballad, and it went to #2 on the pop chart.

 

•
“Scream,” by Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson.
The video was the most expensive ever, at $7 million (nine times what it cost to make Jackson’s “Thriller”).

 

•
“One Sweet Day,” by Boyz II Men and Mariah Carey.
The fourth song ever to debut at #1, it holds the record for the longest time spent at the top of the chart: 16 weeks in 1995–96.

 

• “Don’t Speak,” by No Doubt.
Original band member Eric Stefani wrote it as an upbeat love song. In 1995, just months before the band scored a string of major hits, Stefani left the band to work as an animator on
The Simpsons.
Also around that time, bassist Tony Kanal broke up with the band’s singer, Gwen Stefani, prompting her to re-write “Don’t Speak” as a breakup ballad.

 

•
“Bitch,” by Meredith Brooks.
The FCC allows the word “bitch” to be broadcast on the airwaves when it’s sung in songs, but not when it’s spoken. So, when DJs introduced this song, they had to call it “a song by Meredith Brooks.”

 

•
“How Do I Live,” by LeAnn Rimes.
Rimes was denied the chance to sing this song for the
Con-Air
soundtrack; producers opted for Trisha Yearwood instead. Rimes recorded and released the song anyway…and it was the far bigger hit of the two versions.

 

•
“Doo Wop (That Thing),” by Lauryn Hill.
Half sung and half rapped (and written, arranged, and produced entirely by Hill), every single line rhymes.

 

•
“Believe,” by Cher.
This set a record for largest gap between #1 hits—25 years. Cher’s previous #1 was “Dark Lady” in 1974.

 

•
“Livin’ La Vida Loca,” by Ricky Martin.
Writers Desmond Child and Robi Rosa (Martin’s former bandmate in the group Menudo) claim that they were
trying
to write a bad song—“the Millennium party song from Hell.” (No comment.)

“How young can you be and still die of old age?”

—
Steven Wright

A
portmanteau
is a word that results from two other words being combined. So, here’s a wordplay game we came up with: We took two movies and made “portmanteaus” of their titles. Can you guess the movies, and their combined titles, based on these wacky combined plots? Answers are on page 537.

 

1.
After humanity has covered the planet in garbage and abandoned it, a robot spends his days collecting and compacting trash. He is painfully lonely, until one day he’s visited by a big-eyed, telepathic alien with a glowing finger and pulsing red heart. The robot gives the alien Reese’s Pieces; the alien takes the robot on a magical flying bicycle ride.

 

2.
A small-town hunter (Josh Brolin) finds a bag of money at a murder scene. The bag belongs to a dangerous criminal (Javier Bardem), who is actually an evil alien bent on dominating the universe. He is defeated by two sassy secret government agents (Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones).

 

3.
A newspaper editor (Cary Grant) will do anything to stop his top reporter (Rosalind Russell)—his ex-wife, with whom he’s still in love—from remarrying and quitting her job. And that includes donning a hockey mask and terrorizing a summer camp.

 

4.
An Australian woman (Meryl Streep) goes camping in the Outback. Her baby is killed, and she’s put on trial for murder, despite her insistence that dingoes ate her baby. Proving her innocence is up to her attorney, who’s distraught over the murders of his parents. His name: Batman (Christian Bale).

 

5.
A man (Sidney Poitier) helps a group of German nuns build a church in the Arizona desert. Why? A mysterious voice told him to “build it and they will come.” Ghosts of old baseball players appear and play catch with the nuns.

 

6.
The lion Scar (voice of Jeremy Irons) kills the lion Mufasa (voice
of James Earl Jones) to become king of the jungle animals. After years of tyranny, the true king returns to claim his throne—and he’s a crass, beer-drinking, overweight lounge singer (John Goodman).

 

7.
As he attempts to write the play that ultimately becomes
Romeo and Juliet
, young William Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) meets his muse, a young woman (Ali MacGraw) that he can’t have…because she’s suddenly dying.

 

8.
Professor Higgins (Rex Harrison) bets his colleague (Wilfrid Hyde-White) that he can turn Eliza, a Cockney street peddler (Audrey Hepburn), into a proper lady. Higgins falls in love with her, but so does another suitor: a scruffy dog from the wrong side of the tracks.

 

9.
A bumbling klutz (Charlie Chaplin) goes to the wilds of Alaska to mine for gold with his partner, a Chinese police detective (Jackie Chan) who speaks little English but knows a lot of martial arts. Despite the language barrier—and the fact that the gold miner is completely silent—they manage to save a kidnapped girl from drug lords.

 

10.
In the middle of a four-day bender, an alcoholic (Ray Milland) whose life is in shambles discovers the dead body of his boss (Terry Kiser), which he props up and parades around, pretending that his boss is alive so as not to frighten the pretty girls who are coming over to party.

 

11.
While making one of the first “talkies,” a silent movie star (Gene Kelly) falls in love with a young actress (Debbie Reynolds) brought in to dub the voice of another silent film star (Dustin Hoffman) whose voice is unsuitable for the movies—all he can say is “K-Mart sucks,” and “15 minutes to Judge Wapner.”

 

12.
Despite losing his hand in a light-saber fight with the most brutal leader in the universe (voice of James Earl Jones), who, he just found out, is his father, a young intergalactic warrior (Mark Hamill) must travel back in time in his crazy inventor friend’s (Christopher Lloyd) DeLorean-based time machine and make sure his parents meet, fall in love, and marry.

What
was
to blame for the rapid decline in Hitler’s physical and
mental health in the last years of his life? Here’s the final
installment of the story. (Part II is on page 312.)

All doubts about the safety of Dr. Koester’s Anti-Gas Pills were resolved when some of them were sent to a lab for analysis. The fart pills were found to contain small enough doses of strychnine and atropine that Hitler would have had to have consumed 30 pills or more—all in one sitting—for them to pose a threat to his health. He never took more than 6 at a time, and never more than 20 over the course of a day. Strychnine is quickly neutralized by the human body and does not accumulate in body tissues; because of this, nonlethal doses such as those contained in Dr. Koester’s anti-gas pills can be taken for years on end with little or no ill effect. (Still, don’t try it at home!)

Neither the rat poison nor the peasant poop had done Hitler much good…but they hadn’t done him much harm, either. But the intravenous injections that Morell administered to Hitler beginning in the late 1930s were a different story. Morell was very secretive about what was in the Führer’s regular daily shots; in his surviving medical records he never suggests that they contain anything other than vitamins or glucose. Some of the injections undoubtedly did contain these relatively innocuous ingredients, but not
all
of them. There’s considerable evidence to suggest that many of the shots Morell administered contained something much more powerful—and that they, not the Mutaflor or Dr. Koester’s Anti-Gas Pills, were responsible for the collapse in Hitler’s health at the end of his life.

Some of the most convincing pieces of evidence are the eyewitness accounts of how Hitler responded to the intravenous injections. In the late 1930s, the shots were administered infrequently, usually just before an important meeting or a major speech, when Hitler wanted a quick boost. But by late 1941, they were being
administered every morning, before Hitler had even gotten out of bed, as part of his daily routine. Hitler’s valets, secretaries, and other close aides occasionally witnessed the shots being administered, and after the war they all described how the sleepy and at times completely exhausted Führer responded to the injections instantly, sometimes even while the needle was
still in his arm
: One moment he was groggy and noncommunicative, and the very next he was fully alert and sitting up in bed, contentedly chatting away with whoever was in the room. Ordinary vitamins and glucose don’t produce the instant surge of energy that Hitler experienced, even when injected directly into the veins.

By 1943 Hitler was receiving two shots a day, more if the news from the front was especially bad. As the years progressed—and the tide of the war turned against Germany—Hitler called on Morell more and more frequently to give him the injections. By late 1944, the doctor was administering so many shots that he was having trouble finding fresh areas in Hitler’s needle-pocked arms to give new injections.

And as Morell confided to an assistant, Hitler’s tolerance for whatever was in the shots had increased so dramatically over time that Morell had had to increase the dosage from 2 cubic centimeters per injection to 4, then 10, and eventually to 16 cc—an increase of 700 percent—for the injections to have the desired effect.

As Dr. Leonard Heston and Renate Heston point out in their book
The Medical Casebook of Adolf Hitler,
human tolerance for vitamins and glucose does not change over time. The fact that Hitler was building up a tolerance for the injections is further evidence that they contained a drug of some kind.

When you compare this evidence to the eyewitness accounts of Hitler’s instant response to the drug, a likely candidate for
which
drug he was taking begins to emerge. “The effects described,” the Hestons write, “are characteristic of an injection of a stimulant drug of the amphetamine group or cocaine, and are not compatible with any other drug.” Of the two possibilities, “amphetamine …is a much more probable because its injectable form was readily
available, while injectable cocaine was an illegal drug.…Also, the effects of amphetamine last two or three hours, while the action of cocaine is much more rapidly terminated. The effects on Hitler were relatively long-lasting.”

Amphetamines give the user a surge in energy and an improvement in mood, just as the witnesses to Hitler’s injections described. But they are now illegal for very good reasons: They’re terribly addictive and they have numerous debilitating negative side effects that more than outweigh the handful of desirable effects.

When taken even in moderate amounts, amphetamines can cause insomnia—which Hitler suffered from—and loss of appetite. As dosages increase, so do the number and intensity of the side effects. Psychological side effects associated with amphetamine toxicity include euphoria, irritability, paranoia, impulsiveness, loss of emotional control, and rigid thinking that is often marked by an obsession with minor, unimportant details at the expense of the larger picture. Because these symptoms impair the user’s ability to perceive events and the surrounding environment rationally, decision making also suffers.

Hitler suffered from all of these symptoms and, at least as far as his generals were concerned, his thinking did indeed become impaired, especially his ability to make intelligent, rational decisions. A number of the generals assigned to Hitler’s headquarters were convinced he was losing his mind.

One of the reasons the war in Europe ended in the spring of 1945 and not many months or even years later is that even as the tide of the war turned against Germany, Hitler irrationally demanded that his battlefield commanders hold every inch of ground they had conquered, even when their situations became hopeless. In late 1942, for example, General Friedrich von Paulus, commander of the Sixth Army, requested permission to withdraw his troops from the Russian city of Stalingrad to avoid being surrounded by a superior force of Russian troops. Hitler, who by now was receiving shots every day, responded with the lunatic reply that the Sixth Army could withdraw from Stalingrad, “provided
that it could still hold Stalingrad.” Unable to think of a way to abandon a position
and
hang onto it at the same time, von Paulus dutifully remained in the city. Stalingrad was surrounded a few weeks later, and in January 1943, the Sixth Army surrendered. As many as 800,000 Axis troops died in the Battle of Stalingrad, and when it ended, the 90,000 soldiers who survived it were marched off to Siberia. All but 6,000 perished.