Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader (12 page)

STAND-UP GUY

Puzzles remained more or less unchanged after the 1930s. The artwork improved and special “luxury” puzzle makers sprang up to handcraft custom puzzles for movie stars and captains of industry, but they were really just more of the same thing. By the 1980s, puzzles had become a stale staple of the toy industry.

Then in 1989, a Canadian broadcasting executive named Paul Gallant decided to start a toy company. But he wasn’t sure what kind of toys he wanted to make. “I started thinking about puzzles, and how
they hadn’t changed much since the 1700s,” he told the
New York Times
in 1997, “and wondered why no one had ever made a three-dimensional puzzle.” He experimented with ordinary cardboard puzzle pieces, but they fell over when he tried to stand them up. So he made some out of the same kind of polyethylene foam that is used to insulate airliner cockpits. The pieces were sturdy enough to build miniature walls.

Gallant made a 3-D puzzle resembling a Victorian mansion and took it to the F.A.O. Schwartz toy store in Manhattan, where he showed it to the store’s toy and game buyer. “I took the puzzle and I threw it in the air,” Gallant says. It didn’t break. “I said, ‘No glue, no pins, no nothing, it just stays like this interlocking.’ And I pushed the wall off and I separated the pieces and showed him this was really a puzzle. And he said, ‘Wow, where did you get that?’” F.A.O. Schwartz bought 74 puzzles that afternoon in 1991; Gallant’s company now sells more than $100 million worth of 3-D puzzles—shaped like skyscrapers, castles, the Eiffel Tower, the Titanic, and even Star Wars spaceships—every year, making it another of the biggest puzzle fads in history.

PUZZLING INNOVATIONS

Has it been a while since you’ve bought a puzzle? Here are some new products you might find on your next trip to the toy store:

•
Mono-colored Puzzles.
No pretty pictures, just puzzle pieces, hundreds of them, all painted the same color so that there are no clues as to where they belong in the puzzle.

•
Multiple-border Puzzles.
Pieces with straight edges that appear to be border pieces, but actually are inner pieces.

•
Impossibles.
750-piece borderless puzzles with too many pieces. No taking the easy way out by connecting outer edges first, because edge pieces look like inner pieces. To make it even more puzzling: five extra pieces that don’t fit anywhere in the puzzle.

•
Triazzles.
All of the pieces are triangle shaped with similar designs, but with only one correct solution.

•
The World’s Most Difficult Jigsaw Puzzles.
Double-sided puzzles with 529 pieces. The same artwork is on both sides, rotated 90 degrees with respect to each other.

One of Uncle John’s favorite Marx Brothers scenes is from
Duck Soup.
Groucho is Rufus T. Firefly, head of a country called Freedonia...which is close to war with its neighbor, Sylvania. At the 11th hour, a conference is arranged with the Sylvanian ambassador to make an effort to avert the conflict. Groucho is amenable...until he works himself up into such a state that when the Sylvanian ambassador enters, Groucho slugs him. And, of course, there’s war. We bring this up because as preposterous as it seems, that kind of thing has happened more than once in the
real
world. We call these occurrences the Groucho Wars.

D
IPLOMACY...GROUCHO-STYLE

Here’s Groucho’s
Duck Soup
soliloquy about war and peace.

Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont):
“I’ve taken the liberty of asking the ambassador to come over here, because we both felt that a friendly conference would settle everything peacefully. He’ll be here
in
a moment.”

Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho):
“Mrs Teasdale, you did a noble deed. I’d be unworthy of the high trust that you’ve placed in me if I didn’t do everything in my power to keep our beloved Freedonia at peace with the world. I’d be only too happy to meet Ambassador Trentino and offer him, on behalf of my country, the right hand of good fellowship. And I feel sure that he will
accept
this gesture in the spirit in which it is offered....

“But what if he doesn’t? A fine thing
that
would be. I hold out my hand, and he refuses to accept it.
(Sarcastically) That’ll
add a lot to my prestige, won’t it? Me, the head of a country, snubbed by a foreign ambassador. Who does he think he is, that he can come here and make a sap out of me in front of all my people? Think of it...I hold out my hand, and that hyena refuses to accept it. WHY THE CHEAP, FOUR-FLUSHING SWINE—HE’LL NEVER GET AWAY WITH IT, I TELL YOU—HE’LL NEVER GET AWAY WITH IT! (
The ambassador enters
) So! You refuse to shake hands with me, eh?” (
Groucho slaps him in the face
)

Ambassador:
“...There’s no turning back now. This means WAR!”

THE REAL GROUCHO WARS

These are
not
out of a movie script. People really died in them.

Napoleonic Wars (1865)

Between:
Pararguay and its neighbors—Argentina, Brazil, Uraguay

What Started It:
Francisco Solano Lopez, president of Paraguay believed he was Napoleon. To prove it, he declared war simultaneously on all three countries.

Outcome:
Paraguay was decimated. Nearly half its population was killed in five years of battle.

War Of The Oaken Bucket (1325)

Between:
The independent Italian states of Modena and Bologna

What Started It:
Modena soldiers invaded the state of Bologna to steal a bucket. They succeeded, but hundreds of Bologna citizens were killed in the process. Bologna declared war to avenge the deaths...and to get the bucket back.

Outcome:
They fought for 12 years, but Bologna never did get the bucket. To this day it’s still in Modena, stored in the bell tower of a 14-century cathedral.

War of the Whiskers (1152)

Between:
England and France

What Started It:
King Louis VII of France had a beard when he was married, but shaved it off when he got home from the Crusades. According to
The Book of Lists
, his wife, Duchess Eleanor, thought he looked ugly without it and insisted he grow it back. He refused—so Eleanor divorced him to marry King Henry II of England. Louis wouldn’t relinquish control of Eleanor’s ancestral lands, so Henry declared war to get them back.

Outcome:
This conflict lasted longer than any of the the people who started it—301 years.

War of the Stray Dog (1925)

Between:
Greece and Bulgaria

What Started It:
A Greek soldier’s dog ran across the Bulgarian border. When he followed it across the border, a Bulgarian border guard shot him. Greece declared war and invaded Bulgaria.

Outcome:
The League of Nations called an emergency session to deal with the crisis, and convinced the two nations to end it quickly.

The War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739)

Between:
Spain and Britain

What Started It:
The British ship
Rebecca
, under the command of Robert Jenkins, was sailing off the coast of Cuba when it was boarded by the Spanish coast guard. After looting the ship, the coast guard commander cut off Jenkins’ ear—which Jenkins saved and carried around with him, preserved in a jar. Seven years later the British Parliament invited British Jenkins to the House of Commons to tell his story and show off the mummified ear. It became the rallying point of a war with Spain.

Outcome:
The Spanish were defeated.

The Soccer War (1969)

Between:
El Salvador and Honduras

What Started It:
The neighboring countries were facing each other in a World Cup soccer match on June 27, 1969. Late in the game, a referee gave El Salvador a penalty kick. They scored from the penalty spot and won, 3-2. When news of the ref’s call spread, riots broke out in both capital cities. Fans went on the rampage, looting and beating up opposition supporters. On July 3, war was declared.

Outcome:
2000 people were killed and the Central American Common Market—on which both countries depended—collapsed. The result: serious food shortages and starvation. To add insult to injury, El Salvador lost the next round and was eliminated from World Cup competition.

The Cricket War (1896)

Between:
Britain and Zanzibar

What Started It:
According to one source, “a British ship stationed near Zanzibar entered the harbor in plain sight of Khalid Ben Bargash, the Sultan of Zanzibar. The crew wanted to watch a cricket match on shore.” The Sultan, incensed that they hadn’t asked his permission, declared war on Britain.

Outcome:
The shortest war in history. The Brits sank the sultan’s only ship, an old steamer, and destroyed his palace, in 37 minutes.

Malcolm Forbes wrote a fascinating book about the deaths of famous people. Here are a few of the stories he found.

J
OHN JACOB ASTOR IV

Claim to Fame:
Heir to an enormous fur-trading and real estate fortune. He was one of the wealthiest men in the U.S. in the early 1900s.

How He Died:
On the Titanic.

Postmortem:
One measure of Astor’s social stature was the way he learned the
Titanic
was doomed—the captain warned him privately
before
he sounded the general alarm. According to the accounts of several
Titanic
survivors, Astor and his wife waited until the last lifeboat was loading, then Madeline climbed aboard. When it appeared there would be enough room for him, Astor climbed in and joined her. But just as the boat was about to be lowered into the water, some women appeared on deck. Astor gave up his seat, telling his wife, “the ladies have to go first.” He then lit a cigarette and said to his wife, “Good-bye dearie. I’ll see you later.”

Astor’s body was found floating in the ocean 10 days later, his pockets filled with more than $2,500 in cash.

GEORGE WASHINGTON

Claim to Fame:
First President of the United States.

How He Died:
Bled to death by doctors who were treating him for a cold.

Postmortem:
On December 12, 1799, Washington, 67, went horseback riding for five hours in a snowstorm. When he returned home he ate dinner without changing his clothes and went to bed. Not surprisingly, he woke up feeling hoarse and complaining of a sore throat. But he refused to take any medicine. “You know I never take anything for a cold,” he told an assistant. “Let it go as it came.”

Washington felt even worse the next day. He allowed the estate supervisor at Mount Vernon (a skilled veterinarian, he was the best person on hand for the job) to bleed him. In those days people thought the best way to treat an illness was by removing the “dirty” blood that supposedly contained whatever was making the patient sick. In reality, it only weakened the patient, making it harder to fight off the original illness.

That didn’t work, so three doctors were called. First, they dehydrated Washington by administering laxatives and emetics (chemicals that induce vomiting). Then they bled the former president three more times. In all, the veterinarian and the doctors drained 32 ounces of Washington’s blood, weakening him severely. He died a few hours later while taking his own pulse.

BABE RUTH

Claim to Fame:
One of the greatest baseball players who ever lived.

How He Died:
Cancer of the nose and throat.

Postmortem:
When Ruth fell ill in 1946, “his condition became a matter of nationwide concern, exceeding that usually accorded to the country’s most important public officials, industrialists and princes of the church,” wrote the
New York Times.
By the time of his last ceremonial trip to Yankee Stadium on June 13, 1948, Ruth was so weak that he had to use a baseball bat for a cane.

The Bambino knew he was sick, but no one ever told him what he was suffering from. One afternoon he paused while entering New York’s Memorial Hospital and said to his nurse, “Hey, isn’t this a hospital for
cancer
?” “Cancer and
allied diseases
,” his quick-thinking nurse replied, apparently leaving Ruth none the wiser.

As Ruth got closer to death, Hollywood quickly threw together
The Babe Ruth Story
, a low-budget movie about his life, starring William Bendix (who was so inept an athlete that he had to be coached on how to hold a baseball bat). The Babe managed to live long enough to see it...but apparently, he didn’t approve. In the last public gesture of his life, he walked out in the middle of the film. Ruth never left the hospital again, and died on Aug. 16, 1948.