Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader (13 page)

In 1972 a 1,000-ton meteor entered the Earth’s atmosphere high above the Grand Tetons at a very shallow angle and then skipped back out into space like a stone skipping off the surface of a lake (but not before being recorded by Air Force and tourist photographers). If it had gone all the way through the atmosphere, it would have hit Canada and the impact would have rocked the area with a blast the size of the Hiroshima A-bomb.

TUNGUSKA, SIBERIA

On June 30, 1908, Russian settlers north of Lake Baikal saw a giant fireball streak across the sky. Moments later a blinding flash lit up the sky, followed by a shock wave that knocked people off their feet 40 miles away. The blast was estimated to be more than 10 megatons, toppling 60 million trees over an area of 830 square miles. What was startling about the Tunguska blast was that there was no crater, which led to speculation about the blast: A black hole passing through the Earth? The annihilation of a chunk of antimatter falling from space? An exploding alien spaceship? Research ultimately revealed that the devastation was caused by a meteor about 450 feet in diameter that exploded four to six miles above the ground. If it had landed on a city, no one would have survived.

Wal-Mart’s annual income is nearly equal to that of Russia.

BARRINGER METEOR CRATER, ARIZONA

Located in the middle of the desert, this crater is important because it was the first one on Earth positively identified as the result of a falling meteor. The meteorite that made the crater was about 150 feet in diameter, weighed about 300,000 tons, and was traveling at a speed of 40,000 mph when it landed. The crater is three quarters of a mile wide and was named for D. M. Barringer, the mining engineer who correctly identified it. He also believed that the actual meteorite was still lodged below the Earth’s surface and could be mined for its iron content. (He died before studies revealed that it had vaporized on impact.) Scientists say a meteor of this size can be expected to hit the Earth every 50,000 years. Since this one fell to Earth about 49,000 years ago, we could be due for another one soon.

METEOR FACTS

• So far 150 impact craters have been identified on the Earth’s surface.

• Oldest crater on Earth: Vredefort Crater in South Africa. It’s two billion years old.

• Meteors the size of a basketball hit Earth once a month.

• More than 25,000 meteors bigger than 3.5 ounces hit every year.

• Meteors as large as the one that hit Tunguska impact the Earth every 100 years or so. Bigger explosions, the size of the largest H-bombs, take place about once every 1,000 years.

• Terminology: in space it’s a
meteor;
on the ground, it’s a
meteorite
.

• A large meteorite is always cold to the touch. The outer layers are burned off from its trip through the atmosphere; the inner layers retain the cold of deep space.

• Preview of the big one? In 1994 the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 slammed into the atmosphere of Jupiter, generating an explosion the equivalent of 300 trillion tons of TNT. The comet was estimated to be three miles in diameter; the hole it made was larger than Earth. If it had hit our planet instead of Jupiter…well, you do the math.

An American billion is called a milliard in Britain.

NAME THAT VOICE

You hear these voices all the time—on TV, at the movies, on your computer, even on the telephone. But you probably don’t know anything about the people behind them
.

D
ON PARDO
Born Dominick Pardo in 1918 in Westfield, Massachusetts, his voice-over career began on NBC Radio in 1944, and he’s been working for the network ever since. He moved to NBC-TV in 1950 and over the next 25 years was the announcer for some of the most popular game shows. He was the first to say, “It can be yours…if the price is right!” and worked an 11-year stint on the original
Jeopardy!
Pardo was also the first person to tell the nation that President Kennedy had been shot, reading the bulletin at 1:32 p.m. on November 22, 1963.

In 1975 Lorne Michaels was putting together
Saturday Night Live
and asked NBC if he could use Pardo to announce the show. He thought a trusted and familiar voice would add credibility to a show that was going to feature otherwise unknown talent. NBC agreed, Pardo took the job, and he’s still there, having worked more years on
SNL
than anyone else…including Lorne Michaels. Now in his 80s, Pardo has slowed down somewhat (when he’s not up to doing the opening,
SNL
cast member Darrell Hammond pitches in by impersonating Pardo’s voice), but he still works as often as he wants. Pardo is one of only two people who have been given a lifetime contract by NBC; the other was Bob Hope.

ELWOOD EDWARDS

Edwards was a professional voice-over man in the 1980s, working mostly in local Ohio markets. In 1987 he was in one of cyberspace’s first-ever chat rooms and met a woman with whom he began a correspondence. The two soon fell in love and got married. Edwards’s new bride just happened to work at a company called Quantum Computer Services. In 1989 she overheard her boss saying that he wanted to add a human voice to their new e-mail software. She suggested her husband for the job, so they had him make a tape. From his living room, Edwards recorded a few phrases: “Welcome,” “You’ve got mail,” “File’s done,” and “Good-bye.” Shortly after, the company changed its name to America Online. For the past 15 years, millions of people a day have been greeted by Edwards’s voice on AOL.

Greenland hosts the World Ice Golf Championships. Hazards include ice floes (and frostbite).

DON LAFONTAINE

Don LaFontaine has lent his deep, throaty voice to more than 4,000 movie trailers over the past 40 years—in fact, he single-handedly
invented
the modern movie trailer. Before LaFontaine came along, movie trailers were quickly thrown together by the film’s editors as more of an afterthought than a solid marketing tool, and they came
after
the feature (hence the term “trailer”). In 1962 LaFontaine was working as a recording engineer in New York when he was given the task of creating some promotional spots for the movie
Dr. Strangelove
. He enjoyed the process, and his boss, Floyd Peterson, liked the result. So the two men formed a company whose sole purpose was to create movie trailers. Most of the now-cliché phrases (“In a world where…” and “Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. And no way out…”) were written by LaFontaine. Although he no longer writes the copy, he still records several trailers a week and jokes that when friends ask him to recommend a movie, he describes it as “the white-knuckle rollercoaster ride of the summer,” or as “a very special motion picture that speaks to the soul of every man and every woman who’s ever been in love.”

BILLY WEST

As a child, West’s hero was Mel Blanc, the man behind dozens of cartoon voices. He spent hours trying to imitate all of Blanc’s characters and discovered that he had a natural talent. He tried a career as a stand-up comic but gave it up in 1978 and dedicated himself full-time to creating cartoon voices. It took West a decade in the business before he landed his first big role as Cecil on the 1988 cartoon
Beany and Cecil
. Cartoonist John Kricfalusi directed it and thought West would be perfect for the voice of a dim-witted cat he was creating. West took the job and eventually voiced both main characters on the cult Nickelodeon cartoon
The Ren & Stimpy Show
. From there, he landed one great role after another, voicing some of the most popular characters of our time: Bugs Bunny (originally done by Mel Blanc) and Elmer Fudd in the feature film
Space Jam
; George Jetson for a Radio Shack advertising campaign; the red M&M on the M&M commercials; and several main characters on Fox’s
Futurama
, including Fry, Professor Farnsworth, Doctor Zoidberg, and Captain Zapp Brannigan.

Elwood Edwards’s AOL greeting is heard 18,000 times a minute.

JANE BARBE

Very few people who knew Jane Barbe had any idea how famous she was. Her normal speaking voice had a friendly Southern drawl, quite different from the way she spoke to over 20 million people a day: “Your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and dial again.” Or, “At the tone, the time will be…”

The one-time professional singer (she once toured with the Buddy Morrow Orchestra) began making telephone announcements in the mid-1960s for an Atlanta, Georgia, phone company. Over the next 40 years she recorded automated messages for phone companies, hotel chains, corporations, and cell phone voice mails. Barbe passed away in 2003 at age 74, but her voice lives on—even if it sometimes isn’t hers. Most new voice-mail systems hire women who sound like Barbe to record their menu options.

DON MESSICK

Messick was an out-of-work ventriloquist in the late 1940s when he got his start at MGM. One day, the regular voice actor for the cartoon character Droopy Dog wasn’t available, and neither was another voice actor, Daws Butler. Butler recommended his friend Don Messick to the director, and Messick did so well in the role that he eventually took it over. In 1957, when Hanna-Barbera broke off from MGM and started their own company, Messick and Butler went with them as the two main voice talents. Butler got the lead parts such as Yogi Bear or Huckleberry Hound, while Messick was relegated to mostly sound effects, supporting roles such as Boo-Boo Bear or Ranger Smith, and narration for all the old Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

His most famous role came in 1969 when he was asked to create a voice for a scaredy-cat dog named Scooby-Doo. “I had to come up with what I call ‘growl talk,’” he later recalled. Messick played Scooby until his death in 1997. Other characters he voiced along the way: Scrappy-Doo, Astro the Dog, Bamm-Bamm Rubble, Papa Smurf, and Hamton J. Pig from
Tiny Toon Adventures
.

Q: Where do you keep your
vibrissae?
A: In your nose (they’re nose hairs).

GO, GRANNY, GO!

The good, the bad, and the grandma
.

T
AKE MY WHAT?
In June 2005 91-year-old Katherine Woodworth was walking through the parking lot of a Toledo, Ohio, department store when a young man approached her. “I didn’t have my hearing aid in,” she told reporters later, “and I thought he said he was going to take my
pulse
, and I said, ‘No, you’re not.’” Woodworth proceeded to whack the would-be robber with her purse and continued hitting him until he finally ran to a car and sped off. Another shopper got the license plate number and a short time later, 20-year-old Matthew Spradlin was arrested. The arresting officer, Sgt. Tim Hanus said he was surprised (and amused). Woodworth was too. “I’ll be 92 in August,” she said, “and I guess I’ve got more nerve now than when I was younger.”

WALK SOFTLY, AND CARRY A BIG SHOVEL

One April day, 90-year-old Mildred Luce looked out her window to a horrifying scene: a bobcat had the head of her cat, Smudge, in its mouth. Luce, who lives alone in northern Maine, ran out the door, grabbed a snow shovel, and clamped it down on the bobcat’s neck. But it wouldn’t let go of her cat. So, what did she do? “I took hold of its head with my hand and pulled on its tail—and Smudge popped out.” The kitty immediately bolted into the house…and the bobcat ran in after her. Luckily, it became confused, and Luce (with a neighbor’s help) was able to lock it in the bathroom, where it was later snared by police. Asked what it felt like to grab a bobcat by the tail, Luce told reporters, “I had no fear of it. I was just interested in saving Smudge.”

KEEP-A-GOIN’

Eighty-year-old Marian Foulkes of Melbourne, Australia, wanted to renew her driver’s license but was denied. Her husband, Tom, also in his 80s, had already lost his license, and they were angry. So they got in their car and hit the road. Over the next two weeks the unlicensed duo evaded police on a 1,400-mile joy ride from southern to northern Australia and halfway back again. At that point they were stopped by a policeman and had their keys taken away…so they got on a bus and continued the trip. A few days later, they were finally located in a hotel in Canberra. The couple’s son, Paul, told Reuters that his parents were afraid of losing their freedom. “The desire to be independent, it’s the human spirit isn’t it? They said they had had a good time—they called it a holiday.”

A raw steak is about 75% water.

SHE’S STILL SHARP(SHOOTER)

Janet Grammer is a great-great-grandmother…and a pretty good shot. In April 2005 she was working in a convenience store in Jacksonville, Florida, when a man walked in, fired two shots at the back wall, and demanded money. Instead of giving him the cash, she grabbed a pistol from under the counter and shot the thief in the chest. He fell to the ground, then got up and ran out of the store. Police later arrested him (he’d checked into a hospital). The mother of 10, grandmother of 32, great-grandmother of three, and great-great-grandmother of three wasn’t happy about shooting the man. “All I could think about was his poor parents,” she told police.

DO THE BUMP

A 77-year-old German woman was standing at a street corner in Dresden waiting for the light to change when a man walked by, bumped her with his backpack, and continued walking across the street. That ticked her off. She yelled at the man and ran after him, then grabbed him by the hair and tackled him. A passerby called the police, and the woman sat on the man until they arrived. The judge ignored the assault…and fined the man for jaywalking.