Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader (19 page)

•
Piano:
A spy radio. The person who operates it is the “pianist.”

•
M.I.C.E
. The four most common reasons people turn against their own country and spy for a foreign power: 1)
M
oney; 2)
I
deology; 3)
C
ompromise (they’ve been
compromised
by incriminating information); 4)
E
go.

Eat ’em before they spoil: 65% of American candy brands are over 50 years old.

THE POLITICALLY CORRECT QUIZ #1

Here are some real-life examples of “politically correct” and “politically incorrect” behavior. How sensitive are you? Guess which answer is the “correct” one. Answers are on
page 515
.

1
. In 1994 Great Britain’s Gateway supermarket chain changed some of the baked goods sold in its stores out of fear they might offend customers. What kind of baked goods and why?

a)
Hot cross buns. It removed the “Christian” crosses—buns
without
crosses “better reflect the cultural and religious diversity of modern Britain,” said a spokesperson.

b)
Gingerbread men. It renamed them gingerbread
persons
“to promote gender parity.”

c)
Bear claws. It dropped the “bear.” Now they’re just “claws.” “The imagery of an amputated bear claw was rather demeaning to bears,” said a spokesperson.

2
. After a 10-year battle, in 2004 commissioners in Jefferson County, Texas, voted to change the name of a street that some community members found offensive. Which street?

a)
Liberal Lane. (Jefferson County is 70 percent Republican).

b)
Sissy Street, named in honor of county founder Jefferson Davis Sissy. “I don’t care if he died at the Alamo,” local resident Shelby Jones told reporters. “I’m tired of living on Sissy Street.”

c)
Jap Road. Ironically, the street was named in
honor
of Yasvo Mayumi, a Japanese immigrant and farmer who introduced rice farming to the area in the early 1900s.

3
. In 1999 a former employee of Play It Again Sports in Sydney, Nova Scotia, filed a complaint alleging that her employer “created a poisoned environment” by giving her a demeaning nickname. What was the nickname?

a)
Hot Pants. (The woman resented the sexual innuendo.)

b)
Kemosabe. (The woman is a member of an Indian tribe.)

c)
Big Girl. (The woman was sensitive about her weight.)

Ain’t it grand? Rachmaninoff could cover 12 white keys on the piano with one hand.

4
. In 2004 a student named Yvan Tessier was denied admission to a college course in Canada’s University of New Brunswick. What was the course, and why was he denied admission?

a)
History of the Animal Rights Movement. The class had a “cruelty free” dress code, and Tessier refused to leave his leather shoes outside in the hallway.

b)
History of Sex Discrimination. Tessier is a man, and the class admits only women. “He has no context for understanding the subject. Besides, as a typical male, he probably just wants to gather information to use against women,” said the professor, Sarah Pearsson.

c)
Immersion English. The course requires that only English be spoken in the classroom and Tessier, who is blind, has a guide dog that responds only to French commands.

5
. In the spring of 2004 a Lexington, Kentucky, high school student was barred from going to her own prom because she was wearing a dress the school considered “inappropriate.” What was wrong with the dress?

a)
Instead of sequins, it was decorated with condoms.

b)
It was styled to look like a Confederate flag.

c)
It was an old-fashioned hoop skirt with a petticoat. (Too traditional). “Why even have a feminist movement if women are going to dress like we never won the right to vote?” one school official told reporters.

6
. In 2005 Oklahoma State Senator Frank Shurden proposed lifting the ban on cockfighting in his state by making the following reform to the blood sport:

a)
Put tiny boxing gloves on the roosters.

b)
Use radio-controlled robot roosters instead of real roosters.

c)
Have them wear “uniforms” of protective padding similar to those worn by professional football players.

*        *        *

“Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first.”

—Ernestine Ulmer

The good news: You’re 96% likely to die a natural death. The bad news: you’re still gonna die.

ROYAL PURPLE

Today clothing comes in a wide variety of colors and shades, but that wasn’t always the case. Read on to find out how people first made purple clothes
.

T
HE LAND OF THE PURPLE
According to an ancient Greek legend, the god Hercules was walking his dog on a beach one day when he suddenly noticed that the dog’s snout had turned brilliantly purple. Upon investigating, Hercules discovered that the dog had been eating some sea snails. He gathered some of the snails himself, crushed them, spread the juice on some cloth—and was amazed by the vibrant color. So he dyed an entire robe with the color and sent it to the king of Canaan, declaring that the brilliant purple should be the color of his royal house. The king agreed.

Fable or not, purple dye was first used in Canaan (modern-day Lebanon). Around 1800 B.C., people in the port city of Tyre discovered that certain glands of the murex—a small, spiral-shelled mollusk—when extracted, produced a purple substance that could be used to dye cloth. Humans had been making dyes for thousands of years, but no one had never seen a color like this. The Canaanites started making the dye in their colonies all around the Mediterranean Sea, beginning the world’s first chemical dye industry. The color became known as “Tyrian purple” and was so famous that it and the murex “fish” are mentioned in many ancient texts, including the Torah and the Bible. And “Canaan” was later known as Phoenicia—which means “the land of the purple” in Greek.

PURPLE GOLD

The dyeing process: Gather several thousand murex, crack them open, use a sharp tool to extract the glands and veins, mix well, and spread the substance on a piece of silk or linen. Place the fabric in the sun, and in a few days it will turn purple. Sounds simple, but it took more than
12,000 murex
to make just 1.4 grams of dye—less than a teaspoonful! At its peak, a pound of dyed cloth cost ten to twenty times its weight in gold.

Only the extremely wealthy could afford such a luxury, which meant royalty—that’s how the color got the name “royal purple.” In fact, another name for being born of royal blood was to be “born in the purple.”

All sturgeon caught in British waters are legally the property of the Queen.

Some purple extravagances:

• Legend says that in the first century B.C., Cleopatra sailed to battle in a ship with a huge purple sail to show off her wealth.

• In the first century A.D., Roman emperor Nero made it a law that only emperors could wear royal purple. The punishment for violating the law: death. (Some historians believe the law was enacted to protect the shellfish, which were already in danger of extinction due to aggressive harvesting for the dye industry.)

A NEW PURPLE

The mollusk-based dye industry changed hands several times as various empires—Egyptian, Persian, Greek, and Roman—took control of the lands around the Mediterranean. Yet purple remained the color of royal houses until the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire in 1453. Popes and high church officials had also worn royal purple through the ages, but in 1464 Pope Paul II made a less expensive dye, known as “cardinal’s purple,” the new official color of the church. That brought an end to the Mediterranean murex dye industry—which had survived for over 2,500 years.

The new purple was made from another very ancient process, one that used insects. Small, pea-sized kermes bugs infest a type of oak tree common in southern Europe and the Middle East. The insects were gathered from the trees, killed by exposure to heat (sometimes by the steam of boiling vinegar), dried and crushed into a powder that could be mixed with water, and applied to cloth. Cardinal’s purple, which was actually more scarlet than purple, became the luxury dye of the Middle Ages, just as royal purple before it. Did it last? Yes: Catholic cardinals still wear the color today.

BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY

In 1856, 17-year-old student William H. Perkin was given an assignment at the Royal College of Chemistry in London: produce a synthetic form of quinine, which is naturally produced in the bark of the
cinchona
tree in South America (quinine was used by Europeans to fight malaria). One experiment, with by-products of coal tar and aniline, led to a purple sludge. Perkin liked the color so much that he dyed some silk with it, and was so impressed with the result that he quit school and opened a dye factory.

In ancient Peru, chili peppers were used as money.

Perkin called his color “mauve” (the French name for the purple mallow flower), but marketed it as “Tyrian purple.” This new dye was affordable enough for the masses, and it quickly became hugely popular in Europe. Just as royal purple had marked the birth of the chemical dye industry 3,000 years earlier, mauve began the synthetic dye industry, which would go on to replace virtually all handmade dyes. The new color even got a nod from royalty: Queen Victoria wore a mauve silk robe to the Royal Exhibition of London in 1862.

UNCLE JOHN’S FAVORITE PURPLE

There were other ways of making purple (or nearly purple) dye in ancient times, but they didn’t produce the brilliant color that the murex dye did. One was known as Orchil dye, also known as “poor man’s purple” because it used a cheaper base and was much easier to make. The important ingredient in Orchil dye was lichen—mossy fungi that grow on rocks and tree trunks. Another vital ingredient was uric acid. Where did ancient people get uric acid? From urine. Recipes from the time instructed how much was needed to get the desired color. Here’s one from the
Plictho de L’Arte de Tintori
, from the 1540s:

Take one pound of the Orselle of the Levant, very clean; moisten it with a little urine; add to this sal-ammoniac, sal-gemmae, and saltpetre, of each two ounces; pound them well, mix them together, and let them remain so for 12 days, stirring them twice a day; and then to keep the herb constantly moist, add a little urine, and let it remain eight days longer, continuing to stir it; afterwards add a pound and a half of pot-ash well pounded, and a pint and a half of stale urine. Let it remain eight days longer, stirring as usual; after which you add the same quantity of urine, and at the expiration of five or six days, two drachms of arsenic; it will then be fit for use.

*        *        *

“Time’s fun when you’re having flies.”

—Kermit the Frog

Don’t blink! A 30-minute cartoon may contain over 18,000 separate drawings.

UNLIKELY BEST SELLERS

Recipe for a best seller: author writes great book, a publisher buys it, book is hyped and promoted, and sells a lot of copies. Except that it doesn’t always happen that way. Take these books, for example
.

T
HE ANARCHIST COOKBOOK
It was 1968. Nineteen-year-old William Powell was peripherally involved in the “counterculture” movement, smoking marijuana and attending anti-war protests. But he longed to do something
really
subversive, something to promote violence and chaos as a vehicle for social change. So, using military manuals and other sources that he got from the public library, he began compiling instructions for such activities as how to build pipe bombs, how to pick locks, how to manufacture LSD, and how to counterfeit money. He interlaced the “recipes” with anti-government rantings, put it all in book form, and under the pseudonym “Jolly Roger,” shopped
The Anarchist Cookbook
to publishers. One (but only one) was interested: Lyle Stuart, who published it, unedited, in 1970.

By 1976
The Anarchist Cookbook
had sold more than 800,000 copies…but Powell had changed. Radically. He’d graduated college, married, embraced religion, and was teaching high school. And although many of the “recipes” were inaccurate and didn’t work, Powell now considered
The Anarchist Cookbook
the dangerous creation of an irresponsible youth, so he asked Lyle Stuart to take the book out of print. But Stuart refused, citing a loophole in Powell’s original contract: Powell had refused royalties, so the copyright was taken out in the name of the publisher, not the writer, as is the usual practice. In other words, Lyle Stuart owned the book. In 1990 Stuart sold the rights to another publisher, Barricade Books. The book remains in print and has sold more than two million copies to date.

THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY

In 1990 Robert James Waller, a University of Northern Iowa economics professor, spent 14 days writing a short romantic novel about a lonely housewife who engages in a brief love affair with a photographer who comes to Madison County, Iowa, to photograph covered bridges. Waller printed a few copies and sent them as gifts to a handful of friends and family, one of whom liked it so much that he sent it to a friend of his: a literary agent. A few weeks later, Waller received a surprise phone call from the agent. “Robert,” he said, “where have you been all my life?” Warner Books published it in 1992.