Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader (36 page)

THE BIG CHEESE

Meaning:
An important or self-important person.

Origin:
Sounds like it comes from a big wheel of cheese, but actually is derived from
chiz
, the Persian and Urdu word meaning “thing.” It also might have been a play on the word “chief.”

SPICK AND SPAN

Meaning:
Neat and well turned out.

Origin:
“This expression was first used to describe ships fresh from the shipwrights and carpenters. A spick was a ‘spike’ or ‘nail,’ and span was a ‘wood chip.’” (From
To Coin a Phrase
, by Edwin Radford and Alan Smith)

THE WHOLE SHEBANG

Meaning:
Everything.

Origin:
“Shebang”—from the Irish word
shebeen
—was coined in America by Irish immigrants. According to the
Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrases
, “A shebeen in Ireland was a very lowly public house, one where drinks were sold without a license....[It] was regarded as a relatively valueless piece of real estate, and the expression ‘I’ll give you so much for the whole shebeen’ became current. Gradually the original reference was lost and shebeen—now shebang after the trip across the Atlantic—came to mean any kind of...business affair.”

More examples of Murphy’s Law—anythng that
can
goe wroong will!

C
OME AND LISTEN TO A STORY...

“[Using] the very latest equipment, Texaco workmen set about drilling for oil at Lake Peigneur in Louisiana during November, 1980.

“After only a few hours of drilling they sat back expecting oil to shoot up. Instead, however, they watched a whirlpool form, sucking down not only the entire 1,300-acre lake, but also five houses, nine barges, eight tugboats, two oilrigs, a mobile home, most of a botanical garden and ten percent of nearby Jefferson Island, leaving a half-mile-wide crater. No one told them there was an abandoned salt mine underneath.

“A local fisherman said he thought the world was coming to an end.”

—The Return of Heroic Failures

DETAILS, DETAILS

“A group of Russian counterfeiters produced a near-perfect run of bogus 50,000-ruble bank notes (worth about $22). Once they went into general circulation, officials agreed that it was an excellent job and [the bills] appeared to be genuine currency. Their only error was misspelling ‘Russia.’”

—Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest

AND WAS THAT IN 1492...OR 1865?

“Ads that ran in national newspapers last week for the forthcoming movie
Jefferson in Paris
used images of the Constitution of the United States.

“Then it was learned at Walt Disney Co., where the film and ad were created, that neither Thomas Jefferson nor Nick Nolte, who plays him in the movie, had written the Constitution.

“‘We all walked in Monday morning and said, “Oh, s—t, it should
have been the Declaration of Independence!’ an unnamed Disney executive told
Newsweek.

“The magazine notes that Disney is the company that planned to build a Virginia theme park to celebrate American history.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

SO MUCH FOR THE “MEDIA ELITE”

“On June 9, 1978, Mr. Bob Specas was ready to beat a domino record by knocking down 100,000 dominoes in a row. The media was there to broadcast the historic event. A TV camera recorded his progress as Specas set up the last dominoes for his performance.

“97,497...97,498...97,499. Then a TV cameraman dropped his press badge...and the dominoes went off.”

—The 176 Stupidest Things Ever Done

HAPPINESS IS A STRANGE GUN

“When police in Saginaw, Michigan, pulled over a motorist on a traffic violation, they made a discovery: the guy was carrying a pistol in his car. Despite his protestations that he had never seen the weapon before, the cops knew their duty and they arrested him. Imagine the officers’ embarrassment when they had to let the suspect go the following day with an apology! Seems the gun had dropped out of a cop’s holster into the car when they were questioning the motorist about the traffic charge.”

—Oops

ALL IN THE FAMILY

“Ian Lewis, 43, of Standish, Lancashire (England), spent 20 years tracing his family tree back to the 17th century. He traveled all over Britain, talked to 2,000 relatives and planned to write a book about how his great-grandfather left to seek his fortune in Russia and his grandfather was expelled after the Revolution. Then he found out he had been adopted when he was a month old and his real name was David Thornton. He resolved to start his family research all over again.”

—Strange Days
, by the editors of
Fortean Times

Here’s one answer to that question, written by Ben Patrusky. We found it in a book called
The Day Lightning Chased the Housewife.

W
HY CRY?

Your dog dies. You win the beauty pageant. You break up with someone you love. Your daughter gets married. You lose your job. Your best friend has a serious accident.

How do you handle such stressful episodes? Chances are you cry. Shedding tears seems to bring about a terrific emotional release.

Why?

No one can say for sure. Humans apparently shed a variety of tears. There are the tears we secrete all the time, those to help keep our eyes properly moistened. Then there are irritant tears, the kind we spill when peeling an onion or coping with smog. Finally, there are emotional tears, the stuff we trickle in response to grief, joy, frustration, or other stresses.

CRY BABIES

Curiously, of all the earthly creatures, only humans seem to shed emotional tears. That makes such tearing a late evolutionary development. Tears of emotional stress also appear relatively late in infant development. Unhappy newborns often cry tearlessly until they are several days old or even until weeks after they are born. But challenge them with an eye irritant, and they can spill tears at birth.

Charles Darwin proposed what appears to be the first scientific theory to explain emotional tearing. In his book
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
, [he claims] it was the total act of crying that relieved suffering and made people feel better—not the secretion of tears, which, he contended, was an incidental and in itself purposeless accompaniment to the catharsis.

About three decades ago another theory surfaced, this one promulgated by anthropologist Ashley Montagu. According to Montagu, the tears that went with sobbing did indeed have survival value in that they helped to protect us against disease. He argued that sobbing—gasping
and convulsive catching of breath—dried out nose and throat membranes, thereby increasing vulnerability to bacterial invasion. Tears, which also drain into the nasal passages, served to offset this tendency towards dryness....

ANOTHER IDEA

Dissatisfied with both theories, William H. Frey II, a biochemist and director of the psychiatry research laboratories at the St. Paul-Ramsey Medical Center in Minnesota, suggested another hypothesis. He proposed that tears may help to rid the body of chemicals produced by emotional stress. According to Frey, when we need relief, we may literally “cry it out.” He argued that all other excretory functions—urinating, sweating, exhaling, defecating—are involved in removing excess or toxic products from the body. Why shouldn’t the same hold true for emotional tears?

CRY ME A RIVER

On the face of it, Frey’s theory seems most plausible. But for now it remains purely speculative. None has been verified or refuted in the lab. Frey’s hypothesis, however, seems most amenable to experiment. As such, the Minnesota investigator recently [1989] began a series of trials aimed at testing its validity. One thing he’s doing is having volunteers watch tear-jerkers; his favorite is
The Champ
, a movie about a down-and-out boxer and a little boy. He compares these emotion-provoked tears with irritant tears collected from the same subjects while they peel onions. If Frey’s theory has merit, then there should be a significant difference in the chemistry of these two varieties of tears. Results from a group of over 80 subjects suggest there are. Emotional tears contain a greater concentration of protein than do irritant tears.

But there’s no telling what, if anything, this protein difference means. Are there differences in protein kind as well as quantity? Are there specific proteins associated with emotion? If so, how do they relate to the hormones or other agents that mediate our emotions? Is there a specific substance associated with each emotion? Is there one agent, for instance, that makes us feel anger, another, elation, and yet a third, grief? Only time and research will tell.

To be continued in our next edition.

Limericks have been around since the 1700s. Here are a few of the more “respectable” ones that readers have sent us
.

A certain young chap named Bill Beebee

Was in love with a lady named Phoebe;

‘But,’ he said, ‘I must see

What the clerical fee

Be before Phoebe be Phoebe Beebee.’

There was a young artist called Saint,

Who swallowed some samples of paint;

All shades of the spectrum

Flowed out of his rectum

With a colorful lack of restraint.

A flea and a fly in a flue

Were imprisoned, so what could they do?

Said the fly: ‘Let us flee,’

Said the flea: ‘Let us fly!’

So they flew through a flaw in the flue.

When a jolly young fisher named Fisher

Went fishing for fish in a fissure,

A fish, with a grin,

Pulled the fisherman in;

Now they’re fishing the fissure for Fisher.

There was a young fellow called Cager,

Who, as the result of a wager,

Offered to fart

The whole oboe part

Of Mozart’s
Quartet in F Major.

The fabulous Wizard of Oz

Retired from business becoz

What with up-to-date science,

To most of his clients,

He wasn’t the Wizard he woz.

There was an old spinster from

Fife,

Who had never been kissed in her life:

Along came a cat,

And she said “I’ll kiss that!”

But the cat meowed: “Not on your life!”

I sat next to the Duchess at tea,

Distressed as a person could be.

Her rumblings abdominal,

Were simply phenomenal,

And everyone thought it was me!

Said an eminent, erudite ermine:

“There’s one thing I cannot determine:

When a dame wears my coat,

She’s a person of note—

When I wear it, I’m called only

vermin.”

Besides music, singer Dolly Parton is known for three things. The third is her straight talk. Here’s a bit of what she has to say.

“I’m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes, because I know I’m not dumb...and I also know that I’m not blonde.”

“One of the surest signs that a woman is in love is when she divorces her husband.”

“It’s important that, though I rely on my husband for love, I rely on myself for strength.”

“I was the first woman to burn my bra—it took the fire department four days to put it out.”

“I buy all those (fitness) videos—Richard Simmons, Jane Fonda. I love to sit and eat cookies and watch ’em.”

(On her acting) “I’m never going to be a Meryl Streep. But then, she’ll never be a Dolly Parton either.”

“I’ve never left the Smoky Mountains, I’ve taken them with me wherever I go, and (pointing to her chest) I’m not referring to these either.”

“You’d be surprised how much it costs to look this cheap.”