Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader (25 page)

HE NEEDS HELP

Background:
A desperate Austrian man called police to his home in January 2005. He claimed the house was haunted. For weeks he had continually heard footsteps in the hallways and doors slamming through the night. He begged the police for help.

Exposed!
Police put video cameras in the house and for the next few weeks compiled footage of the “ghost”—the 42-year-old wife of one of the man’s employees. She was charged with creating a nuisance and jailed for four months. Why she did it remains a mystery.

BUT IT SOUNDED GOOD

Background:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology student Jeremy Stribling submitted an academic paper to a leading technology conference. The paper, entitled “Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy,” was accepted, and he was invited to speak at the World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics in Orlando, Florida.

Exposed!
The paper was nothing but gibberish generated by a computer program. The program, written by Stribling and two fellow students, automatically spit out important-sounding nonsense, such as: “We can disconfirm that expert systems can be made amphibious” and “We concentrate our efforts on showing that the famous ubiquitous algorithm for the exploration of robots by Sato et al. runs in Ω((n + log n)) time [22].” Stribling later admitted to the hoax, adding that they’d done it because they were tired of being inundated with e-mail spam soliciting research papers for the conference. His conference credentials were subsequently revoked.

Now you know: A white flag means surrender; a yellow flag means infectious disease.

IRONING OUT HIS PROBLEMS

Background:
In 1999 Marcus Danquah, 41, of Kirton Lindsey, England, sued British appliance maker Morphy Richards, seeking $300,000. He claimed that a faulty clothes iron had given him an electric shock and a heart attack.

Exposed!
During the course of the trial the court heard that Danquah, an engineer, had rewired the iron so that it shocked anyone who touched it. The company also charged that Danquah faked his heart attack with a homemade electric device. “They say it was hidden in his underpants,” Judge Donald Hamilton reported, “and that he referred to the device as his ‘electric underpants.’” Danquah, who’d already spent more than $20,000 in legal fees, was ordered to pay the company’s court costs.

FLOWER CHILD

Background:
The “Flower Portrait” is probably the best-known painting of William Shakespeare. The familiar portrait, showing the Bard looking slightly to his right, wearing a wide white collar pressed tight up to his chin, has been reproduced countless times. (It is often printed on the cover of programs for Shakespeare plays.) It was named for one of its owners, Sir Desmond Flower, who donated it to the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1911. According to the date on the reverse side of the picture, it was painted in 1609—while Shakespeare was still alive.

Exposed!
In 2005 experts at London’s National Portrait Gallery conducted a four-month study of the painting, using X-rays, ultraviolet light, paint sampling, and microphotography. Their conclusion: It’s a fake. It was painted between 1814 and 1840, 200 years
after
Shakespeare’s death. They have no idea who painted it.

Portland, OR, and Bend, OR, each has an extinct volcano within its city limits. Honolulu has 2.

WHAT DREAMS MEAN

Psychologists say dreams reflect our waking lives. Although translations will vary with each individual, researchers say everybody’s dreams share some common themes. Here are some examples
.

• If you’re naked
, you’re dreading an upcoming event because you feel unprepared, ashamed, or vulnerable.

• If you’re falling
, it’s a subconscious response to real-life stress. However, some experts say the “stress” could be something as simple as a mid-sleep leg or arm spasm.

• If you die
, it doesn’t portend death (yours or anybody else’s)—it suggests insecurity or anxiety.

• If you dream about a dead relative
, you’ve come to terms with the loss. Dream psychologists say we only dream about deceased loved ones when the grief process is complete.

• If you see a car wreck
, a big undertaking in your life may feel bound for failure.

• If you’re being chased
, you’re probably running away from something in real life. Being unable to run in a dream indicates feeling overwhelmed by daily pressures.

• If your teeth fall out or crumble
, you’re unhappy with your physical appearance. It may also mean you’re excessively concerned about how others perceive you.

• If you’re giving birth
, great change is unfolding. Dreaming about babies indicates a desire to behave more maturely.

• If you can fly
, you’ve just conquered a stressful situation. If you dream that you’re able to control where you fly, it’s a sign of confidence. Flying aimlessly suggests you’re cautiously optimistic about your success.

• If you dream about water
, it represents a general sense of your emotional state. Clear water means satisfaction with work and home. Muddy water is a sign of skepticism and discontent.

•If you’re urinating
, you may be expressing desire for relief from a difficult situation. Or you may really have to pee. Or you may be doing so already.

Author Anne Rice’s real name is Howard O’Brien. (She was named after her father.)

THE LITTLE RASCALS

With 221 episodes filmed over more than two decades
, Our Gang/Little Rascals
is the most successful, longest-running film series in Hollywood history. Here’s how the Little Rascals found their way onto the silver screen
.

S
TICKS AND STONES
One day in 1921, a Hollywood producer named Hal Roach spent a frustrating morning auditioning girls for a part in one of his movies. It wasn’t going well—the kids sounded too rehearsed and their stage makeup made them look like little grown-ups. In those days child actors were supposed to act like adults, not like normal kids. They were usually well scrubbed and well behaved, and because the adult characters were almost always the center of the story, the kids interacted with grown-ups more than they did with each other. They were often little more than props.

That afternoon when the auditions ended, Roach sat in his office and stared out at the lumberyard across the street. He noticed a group of kids that had snatched a few sticks to play with, and were now arguing over them—the smallest kid had grabbed the largest stick, and the biggest kid wanted it.

Roach was fascinated. “I knew they would probably throw away the sticks as soon as they walked around the block,” he recalled more than 60 years later, “but the most important thing in the world right then was who would have which stick. All of a sudden I realized I had been watching this silly argument for over fifteen minutes because they were real kids.”

FORMING THE GANG

Roach thought movies about “kids doing the things that kids do” might make interesting viewing. As he told Leonard Maltin in
The Life and Times of the Little Rascals: Our Gang
, “I thought if I could find some clever street kids to just play themselves in films and show life from a kid’s angle, maybe I could make a dozen of these things before I wear out the idea.”

Roach started putting together a cast of archetypal kids that audiences would be able to relate to: the leader of the pack, the pretty girl who gets teased by the boys, the tomboy, the nerdy smart kid, the chubby kid, the spoiled rich kid, etc.

Q: What is a group of 12 or more cows called? A: A
flink
.

Roach also decided to cast black kids in some of the parts. That may not sound like a big deal, but in the 1920s it was unheard of. In fact, he was the first Hollywood filmmaker to depict black kids and white kids playing together, treating each other as equals, even going to the same schools. (The integrated school scenes were cut out whenever the films played in the South.)

Characters like Farina, Stymie, and Buckwheat have since been criticized for perpetuating ethnic stereotypes, and ethnic humor was common in the series, especially in the early days. But the fact that the cast was integrated at all was a milestone. Hollywood films of the 1920s
never
portrayed blacks and whites as social peers, and they wouldn’t for years to come. But Roach was determined that his kids would be peers.

Casting that first group of little kids was a snap—Roach just asked around the studio lot. Everybody, it seemed, either had a kid or knew one they thought would be good for a part. An eight-year-old black child actor named Ernie “Sunshine Sammy” Morrison was already appearing in Roach comedies, and his family knew of a one-year-old named Allen Hoskins. (Allen, better known as “Farina,” would go on to appear in 105
Our Gang
comedies—more than any other kid.) Photographer Gene Kornman’s five-year-old daughter Mary was interested; so was her friend Mickey Daniels. Roach also hired a six-year-old child actor named Jack Davis, a three-year-old named Jackie Condon, a chubby four-year-old named Joe Cobb, and a few other kids as well.

TESTING THE WATERS

The very first film, titled
Our Gang
, was shot twice with a different director each time because Roach didn’t think the first version was funny enough. The second film, a 20-minute silent short, directed by an ex-fireman named Bob McGowan, was a hit with test audiences, critics, and movie exhibitors alike. When Roach received repeated requests for “more of these
Our Gang
comedies,” he decided that would be the name for his series. The kids themselves were billed as “Hal Roach’s Rascals”; the name “Little Rascals” came much later.

The fourth
Our Gang
movie to be filmed,
One Terrible Day
, was actually the first one released to the public; it hit the theaters in September 1922.
Our Gang
(the first film) was released two months later.

Jupiter has 63 moons.

These films were unlike any that audiences had seen before. Kids were the stars, but the films were designed to appeal to people of all ages. And they were a hit from the start—kid actors were acting like real kids, arguing, getting dirty, and getting into all kinds of mischief. The acting was so natural that audiences forgot they were watching a movie.

ACT NATURALLY

How was
Our Gang
director Bob McGowan able to coax such authentic performances out of actors as young as two years of age? He didn’t have many options—reading scripts and memorizing lines was out, since many of the kids were too young to read. So McGowan made acting a game: he explained the scenes to the kids as carefully as he could, then he filmed them as they playacted their parts. (One unintended consequence: as the kids grew older and became more aware of themselves as actors, their acting style sometimes became less natural.)

Because the
Our Gang
films were so successful, it wasn’t long before every child star in Hollywood—not to mention thousands of aspiring kid stars all over the country—started clamoring for a part in the series. Mickey Rooney came to Hollywood just to audition for
Our Gang
. He didn’t make the cut, and neither did the biggest child star in Hollywood history, Shirley Temple.

SHOW BUSINESS

• A kid could be cast in an
Our Gang
film as young as two or three years of age (infants and toddlers were sometimes used as extras), and the average age was around seven. Most started out as supporting players and were promoted to more central roles as they got older. Spanky was a notable exception—he was cast in starring roles from the very beginning.

• The youngest actors weren’t allowed to be on the lot more than six hours a day, and they spent at least half that time playing off camera, not working on the films. Once actors reached the age of six, however, they were expected to put in a full nine-hour shift (five hours of acting, three hours of school, and one for lunch).

Each year, Americans burn about 200 billion gallons of fuel in their vehicles.

• By the time most of the actors hit 11 or 12, they were starting to look too old for the series, so they were phased out. Kids who matured early had to leave sooner than that.

MAKING NOISE

The Hal Roach Studios shot 88 silent
Our Gang
films between 1922 and 1929. In 1928 they started releasing their films with phonograph records containing music and sound effects that were synchronized with the films—but no dialogue. The first real “talkies” followed a year later. Then from 1929 to 1937 Roach made another 73
Our Gang
shorts. Most film buffs consider these later years to be the best of the series, with the most popular characters—Farina, Jackie, Chubby, Spanky, Buckwheat, Darla, and Alfalfa—delivering their best performances.

DOUBLE TROUBLE

Our Gang
films were 20 minutes long until 1936. Around then, theater owners started to drop short-subject comedies from their schedules to make room for double features. In addition, the big Hollywood studios like Columbia, Warner Brothers, and MGM were bundling their own short-subject films with their feature films and forcing theater owners to take them as a package—if an owner wanted to show an MGM blockbuster like
Mutiny on the Bounty
(1935), he had to show the MGM shorts with it.