Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader (38 page)

4
.
Extension Cable Line:
The extension cable line with the unqualified and undamaged indication can be used. When you purchase the extension cable line, it is necessary to consult with the related attentions.

5
.
You Are Always Attentive:
Observe its work. Advance rationally. Do not use the tool if you are unknown the work. Do not let other persons operate the machine, hold it of its field or work away.

6
.
Ensure Workpiece in Stability:
Use chip devices or a screw cane in order to hold the workpiece.

7
.
Little Pressure:
You do not use in the use of the multifunctional tools to high pressure; bit it and disks ability broken. Use only clean and sharp accessories parts.

8
.
No Overload for Tool:
They work better and more certainly in the indicated achievement area.

9
.
Control Its Devices on Damages:
Control your device before each utilize or damages. Device or connection line damages should show, the device may be used no longer until these were removed regular. All parts correctly must be mounted in order to guarantee the flawless business of the device.

Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
was originally titled
All’s Well That Ends Well
.

YOU WANT FRIES WITH THAT?

A few tidbits from the BRI’s french fry files
.

O
RIGIN
So who was the first person to slice a potato into strips and fry them in oil? Nobody knows for sure. France claims a Frenchman was first. Belgians claim they invented it. Still others credit Thomas Jefferson with the achievement in 1802. The most likely answer: they all invented a version of the french fry. People were eager to experiment with this versatile vegetable, so chefs from all over probably sliced and fried them. What is known, however, is that American soldiers returning from France (or possibly Belgium) after World War I started making fries in their homes, just like the ones they were served overseas.

FRY-BRARY

The first literary mention of “chips” (the English term for fries) came in Charles Dickens’s
A Tale of Two Cities
(1859), in which the author referred to “husky chips of potatoes, fried with some reluctant drops of oil.” The french fry made its literary debut in 1894 in O. Henry’s
Rolling Stones
: “Our countries are great friends. We have given you Lafayette and French fried potatoes.”

CAPITAL OFFENSE

Is it “French” fries or “french” fries? Answer: according to most dictionaries, the initial “f” is usually uncapitalized. Why? In this case, “french” doesn’t refer to France—it refers to the way the potato is sliced in long strips, or “frenched.”

COMPU-TATERS

When the McDonald brothers opened their first restaurant in 1940, the featured food was hot dogs (hamburgers weren’t added to the menu until a few years later). But french-fried potatoes were there from the beginning, and McDonald’s knew even then that a superior fry would mean return business. Their biggest challenge was making the quality of the fries consistent, which is difficult when the cooking process consists of dropping raw potato strips into a boiling cauldron of oil. Some came out too crisp; others too limp. So McDonald’s spent millions of dollars to turn fry cooking into an exact science. They even opened a research lab in 1957 solely dedicated to the problem. They created a “potato computer”—a machine that could monitor the temperature of the oil and alert the cook when the batch was done. The potato computer is still going strong today. And McDonald’s is still testing different oils, sugars, and thicknesses in the ongoing quest for the perfect fry.

When the Statue of Liberty was restored, her steel framework was coated with Teflon.

SACRED FRIES

In fact, McDonald’s relentless pursuit of the perfect fry got the company in trouble in 2001. Two Hindus and a non-Hindu vegetarian brought a class-action suit against the fast-food giant, claiming that McDonald’s “intentionally failed to publicly disclose its use of beef tallow in the cooking process under the guise of ‘natural flavor.’” McDonald’s lost and was forced to pay a $10 million settlement to various vegetarian organizations and retract an earlier statement that claimed its fries were suitable for vegetarians.

PUBLIC ENEMY #1

During the tense times leading up to the 2003 war in Iraq, American legislators protested France’s opposition to the conflict by insisting that
french
fries be changed to
freedom
fries in Congressional cafeterias. “We are at a very serious moment, dealing with very serious issues,” countered French Embassy spokeswoman Nathalie Loisau, “and we are not focusing on the name you give to potatoes.” Ironically, the lawmaker who first proposed the patriotic name change has since changed his tune. Congressman Walter Jones (R-NC) is now a staunch anti-war advocate. And once again, french fries are on the menu in the Congressional cafeteria.

BRANDED

A bumbling crook named Colin Wilson stormed into a Leeds, England, fast-food restaurant and demanded all of the money from the cash register. Because the would-be thief had no gun (he was threatening them with a wooden table leg), the manager decided to fight back. He pulled the fry basket from the vat of hot grease and whacked it across Wilson’s face. Screaming in pain, Wilson ran out of the restaurant and went to a nearby hospital, where he was arrested after the nurse called police to inform them that they had “a patient with an outline of a chip basket burned into his forehead.”

Average airspeed of a butterfly: 12 miles per hour.

FRENCH FRY MADNESS

Don’t come between Gregg Luttman and his french fries—especially on New Year’s Day. Allegedly sporting a huge hangover, Luttman pulled into the drive-through line of a Pennsylvania Burger King and went berserk when he was informed that they were out of fries. According to the police report, he made “an obscene gesture at the drive-through clerk, berated Burger King workers, and nearly hit an employee with his truck.” After officers arrived and got him into the back of a squad car, he kicked out the back window. He was fined $150 and given two years’ probation.

POTATOHEAD

Mindy Marland, a bartender at the Checkered Flag Bar & Grill in Wallcott, Iowa, was working one night in 2005 when she saw a waitress carrying a plate of food to a table. On the plate she saw an extremely long french fry. “I was intrigued by it and took it off the plate,” she said. After measuring it out at a whopping eight inches, Marland decided to auction it on eBay. Bids started at $1—the winning bid was $197.50.

*        *        *

WACKO-JACKO

According to Rudy Provencio, who worked for Michael Jackson from 2001 to 2003, the pop star refers to money as “french fries.”

AT&D’OH!

In 2002, AT&T introduced a new junk e-mail filter for its Internet service subscribers. A few weeks later, AT&T began receiving angry phone calls from customers upset about an unannounced rate increase. AT&T didn’t understand—they’d sent a rate hike notice via e-mail to all its customers. What happened: AT&T’s e-mail filter blocked AT&T’s messages, assuming it was spam.

Cabbage patch kids? Cabbage was once considered an aphrodisiac.

FAMOUS LASTS

All good
(
and bad
)
things come to an end someday
.

T
HE LAST MARRIED POPE
. Adrian II was already married when he became pope in 867. He refused to give up his wife and adopt a life of celibacy.

SPRECHEN SIE ENGLISCH?
The last king of England who couldn’t speak English (there were several) was George I, prince of Hanover, Germany. During his 13-year reign (1714–1727), he never learned to speak or write English.

THE LAST PRESIDENTIAL SLAVE OWNER
. When he married Julia Dent in 1848, Ulysses S. Grant inherited a slave from her family. He freed the man, William Jones, on March 29, 1859.

ALL THAT GLITTERS IS NOT GOLD
. The last year Olympic gold medals were actually made of gold: 1912.

GOOD-BYE, MODEL T
. The last Model T Ford rolled off the production line in Detroit, Michigan, on May 27, 1927. More than 15 million Model Ts had been built, more than any other type of car of its time.

THE LAST SILENT MOVIE
. The last full-length silent movie released in the United States was
The Poor Millionaire
, starring Richard Talmadge and Constance Howard, which hit theaters on April 7, 1930.

THE LAST MAN ON THE MOON
. U.S. astronaut Capt. Eugene A. Cernan of
Apollo 17
was the last person to set foot on the Moon, on December 14, 1972. His last words while on the lunar surface: “Let’s get this mother out of here.”

THE KING’S LAST LP
. The last studio album recorded and released by Elvis Presley was
Moody Blue
. Released July 28, 1977, it went to #3 on the charts. Elvis died less than a month later on August 16. He was 42.

Smooooooooooooooooooooooch! Snails “kiss” before mating.

THE LEADED GAS CONSPIRACY

It happens all the time. A product comes out and is found to be harmful, but they keep making it anyway. Here’s the story of one of the most harmful products of all
.

K
NOCK KNOCK
In the early days of the automobile industry, gasoline motors were highly prone to engine knock, caused by low-octane fuel igniting too early in the engine’s cylinders. It sounded like a sharp tapping or rattling, and that wasn’t far off—the motor was rattling itself apart. At the same time, horsepower was lost because the fuel wasn’t being burned efficiently, all of which made for a lot of very noisy and very sluggish automobiles. With thousands of new cars entering the road each year, something had to be done.

Luckily, there was an easy solution: grain alcohol. Internal combustion engines ran great on it, but it was too expensive to be the standard motor fuel by itself. Testing conducted for General Motors by Charles Kettering’s Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company (DELCO) showed that alcohol raised the octane of gasoline—allowing for higher engine compression and eliminating knock. By 1921 a blend of 30 percent alcohol to 70 percent gasoline was the fuel of choice among most automotive engineers.

But later that year an engineer named Thomas Midgley, the DELCO engineer assigned to solve the problem, found a cheaper way to eliminate engine knock. While working under contract for General Motors, he added a small amount of tetraethyl lead to gasoline and discovered that it also did the trick. Even better, lead was much less expensive than grain alcohol. But Midgely’s cost-cutting solution would come at a very high price.

HAZARDOUS MATERIAL

Lead is a neurotoxin that collects in the blood and bones of humans and damages the central nervous system. Overexposure can cause convulsions, blindness, hallucinations, and cancer—as well as coma and death. Its dangers have been known since at least 100 B.C., when Greek physicians described lead poisoning and noted the danger posed to workers by fumes from lead smelting operations. In Midgley’s time, health risks associated with lead-based paint were so well documented that in 1920 the League of Nations proposed banning its use. But despite all the risks associated with lead, and ignoring the proven effectiveness of cleaner-burning alcohol/gasoline blends, in 1923 General Motors, DuPont, and Standard Oil formed the Ethyl Gasoline Company to produce and sell gas with a tetraethyl lead additive.

Natural gas has no odor. The bad smell is added to alert you if there’s a leak.

LET THE BATTLE BEGIN

Almost immediately, workers in leaded gasoline plants started showing signs of lead poisoning. By 1924 at least 15 workers had died from exposure before better ventilation was added to factories. The scientific community called for the banning of lead, labor unions called for safer working conditions, and the New York Board of Health banned sales of leaded gas in 1924. The Ethyl Company found itself at the center of a public health debate—and it was ready to fight.

When the U.S. Public Health Service held hearings on the matter the following year, Midgley testified: “So far as science knows at the present time, tetraethyl lead is the only material available that can bring about these [anti-knock] results.”

Midgely was lying: science knew about alcohol blends. Midgley himself owned several patents on alcohol blends, and three years earlier he’d claimed that “alcohol is unquestionably the fuel of the future.” Now he was saying lead was perfectly safe—pouring leaded gas over his hands and sniffing its fumes to prove his point. But Midgely left out another fact: he was suffering from lead poisoning and had been forced to take time off to recuperate in 1923.

INCONCLUSIVE

In the end, the Public Health Service recommended that a committee be formed to study the effects of leaded gas. Their report: “Owing to the incompleteness of the data, it is impossible to say definitely whether exposure to lead dust increases in garages where tetraethyl lead is used.”

The Ethyl Company declared itself vindicated, and leaded gas was back on sale in 1926.