Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader (43 page)

Stop Fission!
Naturally radiant lady with hot core will bring you to a controlled meltdown. Absolutely no nukes.

MEN SEEKING WOMEN

Ordinary man, 30
, would like to meet ordinary woman.

Menelaus, Conqueror of Troy
wishes to meet the beautiful maiden he ravished many lifetimes ago.

Love-starved SWM
seeking a trophy wife with upper-class looks and attitude to take to my next high school reunion.

Fat, flatulent, over 40
, cigar-smoking redneck seeks sexy woman with big hair to cook, clean, and pick up unemployment checks.

White male, 50, but looks 49
, seeks a person who is female and breathing.

DWM, 45
, and uglier than a bucket of rattlesnakes. I chew tobacco, but I take my hat off at the dinner table. If you can bake an apple pie and kiss this ugly face, I want to hear from you.

DWM, 55, tall, fit, successful
Blah, Blah, Blah; seeking appealing, romantic, Blah, Blah, Blah.

Smart guy: Albert Einstein never memorized his home phone number.

MY OTHER VEHICLE IS IN ORBIT

We keep thinking that we’ve seen every clever bumper sticker that exists, but every year readers send us new ones. Have you seen the one that says
…

I’m Still Hot. It Just Comes in Flashes
.

MY OTHER VEHICLE IS IN ORBIT.

Remember: It’s pillage
first
, then burn.

It’s my cat’s world. I’m just here to open cans.

Just keep staring—I may do a trick
.

Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again.

Coffee makes it possible to get out of bed; chocolate makes it worth it.

My dog is smarter than your honor student
.

PHYSICALLY
PFFFFFT!

If all else fails, stop using all else.

Don’t Drink and Derive. Alcohol and Calculus Don’t Mix.

What would Scooby do?

BOTTOMLESS PIT OF WANTS AND NEEDS

I’m so old that “getting lucky” means finding my car in the parking lot
.

Buckle up—it makes it harder for the aliens to snatch you from your car.

a PBS mind trapped in an MTV world

Welcome to Middle Earth. Now go home.

Officer, will this bumper sticker saying

SUPPORT LAW ENFORCEMENT

save me from getting a ticket?

The only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth.

Dangerously under-medicated.

If I Had a Life, I Wouldn’t Need a Bumper Sticker
.

Household hint: To open a stuck zipper, try rubbing it with soap.

THE KING’S JEWELS

Elvis Presley—he was such a huge star that even if you’re not a big fan, you’re probably familiar with his songs. Here’s a look at the stories behind some of his biggest hits
.

“A
RE YOU LONESOME TONIGHT?”
If you like this song, thank Colonel Tom Parker’s wife. Without her influence Elvis would never have heard of it, let alone recorded it. Written in the 1920s by two songwriters named Roy Turk and Lou Handman, it had been sung by Al Jolson (and other artists) and then languished for more than 20 years before the Blue Barron Orchestra recorded it in 1950. Their big band version only went to #19 on the charts, but Mrs. Parker loved it, and she persuaded the colonel to have Elvis record an updated version. In 1960, the King’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” opened at #35 on the pop charts, making it the first American single to break into the top 40 its first week. The next week it went to #2, and the following week it hit #1 and stayed there for five weeks.

“HOUND DOG”

Believe it or not, when Elvis was first booked to play Las Vegas in 1956, his act bombed. The King was popular with teenagers, not with their parents—and that’s who went to casinos. So his monthlong engagement at the New Frontier Hotel was cut to two weeks, freeing up time for Elvis to take in some of the other acts in town. One of the groups he saw was Freddie Bell and the Bellboys; one of the songs they sang was “Hound Dog,” a slow song by Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton that hit #1 on the R&B charts in 1953.

Freddie Bell sang it comically as if it were a novelty song, even adding his own lyrics, including “You ain’t never caught a rabbit and you ain’t no friend of mine.” Elvis saw the band perform several times and laughed out loud every time they sang “Hound Dog.” When he started performing the song live, RCA Records encouraged him to record it. Elvis resisted at first—“Hound Dog” was a
novelty song
, after all—but he put his own stamp on it by speeding it up and singing it like a rock-and-roll song, which is exactly what it became. “Hound Dog” spent 28 weeks on the pop charts, including eleven weeks at #1.

Why was Elvis’s popular 1956 song “Paralyzed” never released as a single? RCA Victor…

“LOVE ME TENDER”

In 1956 Elvis went to Hollywood to film
The Reno Brothers
, his first movie. He was hoping he wouldn’t have to sing in it—he wanted people to see him as a serious actor, not a singer who made movies—but Twentieth Century Fox (and Colonel Tom Parker) soon put a stop to that, hiring an accomplished songwriter named Ken Darby to write four songs for the movie. For one of them, Darby took a shortcut: he took an old folk song called “Aura Lee” and wrote new lyrics. He must not have liked “Love Me Tender” very much—rather than take credit for it, he listed his wife, Vera Matson, as the author even though she had nothing to do with it.

Fox was impressed: they even renamed the movie
Love Me Tender
to cash in on what they thought was a surefire hit. Their judgment, not Darby’s, proved correct:
Love Me Tender
was the second-highest-grossing film of 1956, and the single knocked “Hound Dog” to #2 on the
Billboard
pop chart, making Elvis the first-ever artist to push his own song out of the #1 spot.

“JAILHOUSE ROCK”

For Elvis’s third movie, MGM hired the team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller to write the title song, which, thanks to the popularity of “Love Me Tender,” would also serve as the title of the film. (Leiber and Stoller were also the guys who wrote “Hound Dog” for Big Mama Thornton.) They spent a couple of months trying to come up with songs, but when they flew to New York to report on their progress, they still had nothing. One of the record company execs, a bear of a man named Jean Aberbach, came to their hotel room and asked to hear the title song. Informed that they still hadn’t written it, he shoved a couch in front of the door, sat down on it, and told them they weren’t leaving until the song was done.

Leiber and Stoller started scanning the film script for ideas. Maybe it was the scene that called for a big production number in a prison block; maybe it was the big guy sitting on the couch. In any event, four hours later they had finished not just “Jailhouse Rock” but three other songs as well. (Aberbach let them out of the hotel room.) “Jailhouse Rock” spent 27 weeks on the
Billboard
charts, including seven weeks at #1.

… was afraid paralyzed people would be offended by it.

THE 12 DAYS OF MYTHMAS

Secret codes and urban legends—Uncle John’s idea of a perfect combination!

S
ECRET TEACHINGS
There’s been a story going around for years that the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” which seems like a nonsense song, actually contains coded teachings of Catholicism. It was written, the story says, during England’s anti-Catholic era, after King Henry VIII split with the Catholic Church and founded the Anglican Church in the 1500s. The open practice of Catholicism actually did become illegal in England, and remained illegal until the Emancipation Act of 1829. During that era one could be imprisoned or even executed for being a Catholic. To avoid such punishment and to preserve the faith, the story continues, some clever Jesuit priests wrote the song, with each day’s “gifts” representing the Catechism—the essential teachings of the Church.

THE HIDDEN SYMBOLS

• The “true love” that is giving the gifts, the story says, is God.

• The “partridge in a pear tree” represents Jesus Christ.

• Two turtle doves: the Old and New Testaments.

• Three French hens: the Holy Trinity; or the three Virtues: Faith, Hope and Charity.

• Four calling birds: the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John).

• Five golden rings: the first five books of the Old Testament, known as the Pentateuch.

• Six geese a-laying: the six days of creation.

• Seven swans a-swimming: the seven sacraments.

• Eight maids a-milking: the eight Beatitudes.

• Nine ladies dancing: the nine fruits of the Holy Spirit.

The Yellow Sea (Korea) is the world’s shallowest, with a maximum depth of 500 feet.

• Ten lords a-leaping: the Ten Commandments.

• Eleven pipers piping: the eleven “good” apostles (Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus, isn’t included).

• Twelve drummers drumming: the 12 points of doctrine of the Apostle’s Creed.

URBAN LEGEND?

The story has been widely spread, especially on the Internet, and is taken by many to be fact. The only problem: there’s no historical evidence to support it. And there’s a lot of logic to refute it:

• All the “hidden” teachings except one wouldn’t have to be hidden at all—they are common to both religions. There would be no reason a Catholic would hide the Old and New Testaments behind “two turtle doves”—since Anglicans follow the two testaments, as well. The same is true of all the other gifts except for the sacraments: Catholics have seven; Anglicans just two.

• If the song was written to secretly teach religious tenets, why would it be a Christmas song, which would be sung only at Christmas? How would they teach the Catechism for the rest of the year?

•
What some people believe happened is that through the years, the song was mixed up with another more openly religious song about the twelve days of Christmas. “The New Dial,” also known as “In Those Twelve Days,” dates to at least 1625, and is remarkably similar to “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” It has one verse for each day, and in some cases the exact same subject matter: two for the two testaments, three for the Holy Trinity, and so on.

• Many people still believe that the song is a secret Catholic code. One of their arguments: there’s no solid proof that the song
isn’t
the secret teaching device they believe it to be—so we really can’t know for sure. That’s what legends are made of. Either way—it’s still a nice song and kids all over the world love it.

*        *        *

So when
are
the twelve days of Christmas?
They’re after Christmas, not before. They start on Christmas Day and end with the Feast of Epiphany, which is traditionally celebrated on January 6.

One in 20 Icelanders claim to have seen an elf.

FORGOTTEN HISTORY: SHAYS’ REBELLION

“A little rebellion now and then is a good thing,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1787. But the American Revolution was long over—so what was he referring to? Shays’ Rebellion
.

B
ACKGROUND
After winning the revolution against the British in 1783, the victorious American soldier-citizens went home with optimism for a bright future. Almost immediately, though, things began to get grim. The lack of centralized federal power bred local governments that ruled with dictatorial corruption. A postwar economic depression hit hard. Boston merchants, in debt to foreign suppliers, demanded immediate payment from debtors. Farmers in western Massachusetts discovered that much of their state-and bank-issued currency was now worth much less than its face value. Many were sent to debtors’ prison and saw their land, livestock, and belongings sold for pennies on the dollar.

PROTEST

A 39-year-old farmer and former captain in the Revolutionary War, Daniel Shays, became the leader for a group of increasingly desperate farmers. At first, they peacefully petitioned the government against the political forces that seemed to unfairly target farmers and working people. Disproportionate property taxes, poll taxes that made voting unaffordable, harsh debt laws, unsympathetic judges, the high cost of pressing (and defending) lawsuits, and the lack of a stable currency left people at the mercy of banks and merchants to define how much their property was “really” worth.

When it became clear that their protests were being ignored, the desperate farmers’ tactics escalated. They began by raiding jailhouses to free imprisoned debtors. Wearing their old Continental Army uniforms (with a sprig of hemlock tucked into their hats), the self-named “Regulators” occupied the Northampton courthouse on August 29, 1786, making it impossible for the court to imprison debtors or seize their property. Inspired by this act of insurrection, other farmers occupied courthouses in Concord, Taunton, Great Barrington, and Worcester. In late September, Captain Shays led a band of 1,500 followers to occupy the Springfield Courthouse to prevent the Supreme Judicial Court from doing business.

Deadliest epidemic ever: The Black Death, claiming 75,000,000 victims from 1347 to 1351.