Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader (44 page)

REVOLT

Shays and his men swore they weren’t leading an insurgency, but rather were continuing the 1776 revolt against tyranny. “I earnestly stepped forth in defense of this country,” wrote one member of the group in an open letter to the public, “and liberty is still the object I have in view.”

In response, Governor James Bowdoin of Massachusetts, funded by contributions from large Boston merchants, hired 4,400 militiamen under the command of General Benjamin Lincoln to put down the revolt. When Shays heard of Lincoln’s attempt to capture the Worcester debtors’ court in January of 1787, he led 2,000 volunteers in an assault on the Federal Arsenal in Springfield, hoping to capture the armory and beef up their firepower. They believed that their neighbors and fellow veterans would join them, as had happened in previous raids. Instead, to shouts of “Murder!” a much smaller force of mercenaries fired cannons into the crowd, killing four men and injuring 20, and repelling Shays’s “Regulators.”

In the meantime, General Lincoln marched his men through a nighttime snowstorm from Worcester to Springfield, and took the Regulators completely by surprise, forcing them to surrender.

PARDON ME

Offered a general amnesty, most of Shays’s men took it. Shays escaped to Vermont, but he was tried for treason in absentia, along with six other leaders.

But what to do with them? Samuel Adams, former Revolutionary agitator and now back in his role as an affluent businessman, argued for execution. “Rebellion against a king may be pardoned or lightly punished,” he wrote, “but the man who dares to rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death.”

Thomas Jefferson was one of the few who disagreed. “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing,” he wrote from Europe. “It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government. God forbid that we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.” General Lincoln, who had successfully subdued the rebellion, also advocated clemency.

An object on Jupiter would weigh 31.75 times more than it would on Pluto.

Nevertheless, seven of the leaders were sentenced to death. Two were hanged. Others were publicly marched to the gallows before being informed that they had been reprieved by Massachusetts’s new governor, John Hancock.

DEFENDER OF LIBERTY

Shays himself avoided that drama. He applied for amnesty from the safety of Vermont and permanently relocated to New York. The government eventually pardoned him for his part in the rebellion that bears his name. He retired on a veteran’s pension for his service in the Revolutionary War. Daniel Shays died in 1825, maintaining to the end that his fight in Massachusetts was for the same principles he defended in 1776.

*        *        *

PRIZE FIGHT

In February 2005,
Los Angeles Times
film critic Patrick Goldstein wrote about how the major movie studios had initially rejected many of the films that were nominated for that year’s Academy Awards. Instead, said Goldstein, they chose “to bankroll hundreds of sequels, including a follow-up to
Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo.
”

Rob Schneider, the star of the
Deuce Bigalow
movies, responded by taking out full-page ads in
Variety
calling Goldstein unqualified to attack his movie—he’d never won any awards, particularly a Pulitzer Prize, “because they haven’t invented a category for Best Third-Rate, Unfunny Pompous Reporter.”

In August 2005, in his review of
Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, Chicago Sun-Times
critic Roger Ebert noted the Schneider-Goldstein feud and said, “As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified. Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.”

Q: What is a bellwether? A: A castrated sheep.

SPELLING TEST

Think you know how to spell pretty well? Take this quize and find oat. Guess witch of these commonly misspelled words is spelled correctly. (Answers on
page 519
.)

1. a)
Milenium
b)
Millenium
c)
Millennium

2
.
a)
Dumbell
b)
Dumbbell
c)
Dumbel

3
.
a)
Seperete
b)
Seperate
c)
Separate

4. a)
Necesary
b)
Neccesary
c)
Necessary

5. a)
Minniscule
b)
Miniscule
c)
Minuscule

6. a)
Accommodate
b)
Acommodate
c)
Accomodate

7. a)
Liason
b)
Liaison
c)
Liaision

8. a)
Harras
b)
Harrass
c)
Harass

9. a)
Occurrence
b)
Ocurence
c)
Occurence

10. a)
Embarrass
b)
Embarass
c)
Embaras

11. a)
Indipendent
b)
Independant
c)
Independent

12. a)
Questionaire
b)
Questionairre
c)
Questionnaire

13. a)
Brocolli
b)
Broccoli
c)
Broccolli

14. a)
Recomend
b)
Recommend
c)
Reccommend

15. a)
Sincerelly
b)
Sincerly
c)
Sincerely

16. a)
Kindergarten
b)
Kindegarten
c)
Kindergarden

17. a)
Supercede
b)
Superseed
c)
Supersede

18. a)
Grammar
b)
Gramar
c)
Grammer

19
.
a)
Refered
b)
Referred
c)
Reffered

20
.
a)
Immence
b)
Immense
c)
Imense

29% of elementary school students say math is their favorite subject, 21% say science.

FAKE NEWS

The mark of a truly good phony news story: People in high places fall for it
.

K
ENNY ROGERS: ROASTED
The Web site
Zug.com
reported that a book signing by country music star Kenny Rogers had disintegrated into a riot in which 19 people were injured. According to the report, Rogers had refused to sign a female fan’s unspecified body part; the fan turned violent and incited the crowd. Zug linked to a report on the Web site of WTF-TV, based in Hazelton, the location of the riot. MSNBC, ABC, and the Associated Press all carried the story. But they failed to verify all of the facts: WTF-TV isn’t real (WTF is Internet shorthand for “What the f***?”), Hazelton isn’t real, and there was no riot. Kenny Rogers hadn’t even written a book. Zug and WTF’s sites both even had disclaimers telling readers the whole thing was a prank. Zug’s intent: to point out that the news media often rushes to report stories without verifying their accuracy.

WE REFUSE TO RETRACT

In 2004, the Chinese newspaper
Beijing Evening News
reported that the United States Congress had threatened to move out of Washington, D.C., unless a new, modernized Capitol building with a retractable roof was built.
Evening News
writer Huang Ke had copied, nearly word for word, the entire story from its source:
The Onion
. (Ke didn’t know that
The Onion
is a satirical newspaper.) The
Evening News
refused to admit fault, until the story was proven to be untrue. A few days later the paper apologized, but blamed
The Onion
for the error, writing “Some American newspapers frequently fabricate offbeat news to trick people into noticing them with the aim of making money.”

HOOSIER DADDY

In 2003 the
Hoosier Gazette
ran an item on its Web site about an Indiana University study that found that 100 percent of parents irreversibly lose 12 to 20 IQ points upon the birth of their first child. That, according to lead researcher Hosung Lee, is why every parent thinks their kid is the world’s funniest, smartest, and cutest. Newspapers in England, Russia, and the Netherlands ran the report, and it was the lead story on Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC talk show. The only problem: the
Hoosier Gazette
is a comic newspaper; the story and study were hoaxes. The next day, Olbermann apologized on air, saying, “So there’s no survey showing that parenthood will cost you at least 12 IQ points. But did you hear about the one showing how many IQ points newscasters lose when they see a story they really want to run?”

Squirrels can climb trees faster than they can run on the ground.

IN OTHER NEWS: THE PRESIDENT IS
NOT
A NINJA

In 2002 two teenagers started the “Fake CNN News Generator” Web site to prank their friends with phony news stories that looked like they came from CNN. Without the teens’ knowledge, word of mouth took over: after the site was mentioned on a morning radio show, two million visitors a day suddenly started generating “Fake CNN News” stories…and spreading them. Newspapers and TV stations ran dozens of stories they thought had originated with the real CNN, among them that rock star Dave Matthews had died of a drug overdose and that the Olsen twins had decided to attend Miami University. (Matthews and Miami U. both had to issue public denials.) Most angered, though, was CNN. Only a week after the Fake CNN News Generator was inadvertently made public, the cable news channel sent a threatening “cease and desist” letter and shut the impostor down.

TERRORISTS WANT TO INTERRUPT YOUR DINNER

In late 2002 Dan Nichols, a detective in Branch County, Michigan, read an article entitled “Al-Qaida Allegedly Engaging in Telemarketing.” Nichols had been leading an investigation of scams that targeted the elderly, and he jumped on the story, using it as the basis for a press release. He warned the public that buying magazines, time shares, or long-distance service over the phone could be funding terrorist cells. Local and national news picked up the story…which was bogus. Nichols had read it in
The Onion
.

Unaware that it was satire, Nichols says he got to the article via a link on the Michigan Attorney General’s Web site. (The AG’s office denies linking to
The Onion
—they’re aware it’s fake.) “I enjoy a good joke,” Nichols said, “I just hate it when it’s on me.”

Most popular reading material of 1900: The Bible and the Sears catalog.

EDITED FOR SENSITIVITY

In the weeks after 9/11, the entertainment industry scrambled to remove any images of the World Trade Center or casual references to terrorism from new movies, music, or television. Here are a few examples
.

I
n September 2001, Jackie Chan was supposed to start filming
Nosebleed
, in which he was to play a World Trade Center window washer who uncovers a terrorist plot to blow up the towers. It was going to be filmed on location. It was scrapped entirely.

• Images of the World Trade Center were digitally removed from the background of episodes of
Law and Order, Friends
, and
The Sopranos
. (Interestingly, the 2003 miniseries
Angels in America
was shot after 9/11, but since it takes place in the 1980s, the towers were digitally reinserted for historical accuracy.)

• The first trailer for
Spider-Man
showed a group of criminals thwarted when Spidey traps them in a web and hangs their entangled helicopter between the two WTC towers. After 9/11, the trailer was immediately removed from circulation, as were posters that showed a reflection of the Twin Towers in Spider-Man’s eye.

•
Party Music
, an album by the rap group The Coup, was delayed a month until October 2001 in order to redesign the cover. The original version pictured two members of the group holding a detonator in front of the World Trade Center, engulfed in flames.

• In the original ending of
Men in Black II
, the World Trade Center towers split open and release a cloud of UFOs into the air, setting off a huge urban battle. After 9/11, a new sequence was produced.

• Microsoft deleted the World Trade Center from the New York skyline for its popular virtual pilot video game, Flight Simulator.

• The Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie
Collateral Damage
was originally supposed to hit movie theaters in October 2001, but was delayed until February 2002. The plot: a firefighter travels to South America in pursuit of the terrorists that killed his family.

• Producers of the 2002 film version of H. G. Wells’s novel
The Time Machine
cut a scene in which meteors rain down on New York City and cause mass destruction.

Mississippi did not ratify the 13th Amendment (which outlawed slavery) until 1995.

• The comedy
Big Trouble
, which climaxes with a nuclear bomb that threatens to explode a passenger airplane, was delayed from September 2001 to April 2002.

• The scheduled November 2001 opening of the Broadway musical
Assassins
, about the men and women who had tried to kill American presidents, was postponed.