Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader (39 page)

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Authors: Bathroom Readers' Institute

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MICKEY MOUSE
, the most famous cartoon character in history.

Inspired by:
A real mouse...and maybe actor Mickey Rooney. The mouse, whom Disney called Mortimer, was a pet that the cartoonist kept trapped in a wastebasket in his first art studio in Kansas City. Rooney, a child movie star, says in his autobiography that
he
inspired the mouse’s new name, in the early 1920s:

One day I passed a half-open door in a dirty old studio and peeked in. A slightly built man with a thin mustache...looked up and smiled. “What’s your name, son?”

“Mickey....What are you drawing?”

“I’m drawing a mouse, son.” Suddenly he stopped drawing, took me by the shoulders, and looked me in the eye. “Did you say your name was Mickey?”

“Yes sir.”

“You know what I’m going to do?...I’m going to call this mouse Mickey—after you.”

Do you talk to your car? According to polls, more women do than men.

THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF, PART I

We’ve all heard the werewolf legend, seen it in films and on TV. In real life, it’s called Lycanthropy. Here’s a little of its history.

A
NIMAL TALES

Nearly every society has legends about people who change into animals. In Russia there are stories of were-bears. In Africa, they have were-leopards, were-hyenas, and were-hippos. In Asia there are tales about were-tigers, elephants, crocodiles, snakes, and even sharks.

Why are these animals singled out? “In almost all cases,” Nancy Garden writes in her book,
Werewolves
, “the animal has these characteristics: 1) It is commonly found in the area; 2) It is feared by the inhabitants; and 3) It has been known to attack people and/or farm animals.”

In Europe, wolves fit that profile: As the population grew over the centuries, Europeans settled in parts of the continent where wolves had roamed freely. As the wildlife that wolves depended on for food began to disappear, they often preyed on livestock. And when food was
really
scarce, they might even go after humans. As late as 1875, an estimated 160 people were attacked by starving packs of wolves in Russia. So it’s not surprising that when Europeans told scary stories by the fireside, wolves were a common subject. Their spooky habit of howling at the moon made them that much more fearsome.

THE WEREWOLF TRIALS

No one (or at least
hardly
anyone) believes in werewolves today, but in the Middle Ages, they were taken quite seriously. “Of all the world’s monsters,” says Daniel Cohen in his book,
Werewolves
, “the werewolf is the one that has been most widely believed in, and the most widely feared.”

Here are some of the things people commonly believed:

#1 cause of depression in married people: being married. In unmarried people: being single.

• A person could become a werewolf in a number of ways: if he was cursed, drank water from a wolf’s pawprint, ate the meat of an animal
killed by a wolf, wore a girdle made of wolfskin, or used a magic salve. “The business about becoming a werewolf after being bitten by another werewolf is basically a creation of the movies,” says Cohen. “‘Real’ werewolves didn’t just bite people, they tore their victims to pieces and ate them.”

• In some versions of the legend, the werewolf remained human, but took on wolf characteristics, such as fur, fangs, and paws. In other variations, the person literally turned into a wolf.

• Werewolves could be killed any way that a normal wolf could be killed.

DEMON WOLVES

It was commonly accepted that werewolves were in league with the devil. Even educated churchmen who didn’t believe human beings could really transform into other animals assumed that the devil was involved. “They often said that the devil created the ‘illusion’ of transformation,” Cohn writes. “He made people ‘think’ they had turned into wolves, and made the victim ‘think’ they were being attacked by the creature.”

Some “authorities” believed a real wolf could be turned into a werewolf when the spirit of an evil person entered it. “It was possible therefore,” Cohen explains, “for an evil person to be asleep in his bed at night, or even locked in a cell under the eyes of his jailers, and yet his spirit could roam free as a werewolf. As a result, a lot of people were convicted of being werewolves even after it was proven that they were nowhere near the place where the werewolf had allegedly committed its crimes.”

This was serious business. In Europe, as late as the 18th century, if you were suspected of being a werewolf you could be put on trial and then put to death. Untold thousands
were
put to death—between 1520 and 1630, an estimated 30,000 cases of “werewolfery” trials were recorded in central France alone, and thousands more trials took place in other parts of Europe.

“The Curse of the Werewolf, Part II” is on
page 351
.

State sport of Maryland: Jousting.

TABLOID SECRETS

This article is adapted from a fascinating book called
Grossed-Out Surgeon Vomits Inside Patient—An Insider’s Look at Supermarket Tabloids,
by Jim Hogshire. (The author worked on tabloids, and the title is a headline he once wrote.) We never realized how carefully the
Enquirer, Globe,
etc.—popular bathroom reading material—are put together.

A
LWAYS JUDGE A TAB BY ITS COVER

Daily newspapers make the majority of their money from advertisers...[and subscribers.] But supermarket tabloids rely on the cover price for at least 80% of their profits.
The National Examiner
, with its million-plus circulation, has never had more than 23,000 people subscribing—despite the substantial discount for doing so.

• It’s that way at all the tabloids. Marketing studies show that most tabloid buyers do not intend to purchase one before arriving in the checkout line and spend fewer than four seconds looking at a cover before deciding to buy.

• A cover can be rejected in a second. Studies in which lasers were aimed at customer’s eyes reveal that a person’s gaze does not often drop below the top half of the page. Sometimes it goes no further than the title.

THE COVER

[So] editors use the cover as their most powerful tool. “It’s the only selling point you have. It’s your only promotion billboard; it’s your only selling point,” says one.

• “It may look like garbage but that’s the way we want it to look,” said Cliff Linedecker, former assistant editor at
The National Examiner.
“We always try to make the cover look like a circus poster.”

• The paper might look haphazard, but the formula is exacting. A “gee-whiz” is the banner headline at the top that announces a 7-year-old girl had a baby on a rollercoaster. “Hey, Marthas” are stories that combine impact with the ability to hold a reader’s interest. In tabloid circles these win as much praise as Pulitzer-winning articles in the mainstream press. The classic “Hey, Martha!” story is “Headless Body Found in Topless Bar.”

A killer whale’s heart beats 30 times a minute under water, 60 times a minute on the surface.

• Also crucial to a good cover is a “must-buy” headline. “People see a headline like ‘Marilyn Monroe Was a Dyke!’ and say, ‘Aw, Christ, I gotta buy that one,’”
Examiner’s
Billy Burt said. “Every editor every week sits down and tries to come up with a ‘must-buy’ headline that’ll catch people’s attention.”

INSIDE THE TABLOID

Filling the pages of a supermarket tabloid is a formulaic process and can be handled with an almost assembly-line approach. Staff writers typically crank out far more stories per week than appear in the paper to create a healthy backlog. Noncelebrity stories have lead times of at least three weeks. Even the most trivial of stories may go through a half-dozen rewrites before the editors are satisfied. Nothing appears in a tabloid story by accident.

• Tabs’ budgets may call for a certain percentage of Bigfoot stories, or a certain number and type of diet articles. Whenever a need arises, editors simply reach into a large file cabinet known as the bin and retrieve whatever story fits the hole they have to fill. If it’s a 6-inch UFO story, it’s there. If they need a 12-incher on a miracle cure at Lourdes, no problem.

• There is no exact science to what goes into a tabloid, yet correct timing seems to play a role. Thus, vinegar and mayo diets might appear only twice a year. Even though Elvis is a proven seller, he cannot be reincarnated at will. The time must be ripe.

• Celebrity photos are guaranteed to appear in the same places in a tabloid, and the “mix” of stories is almost like a recipe, with certain genres appearing in certain places in the magazine. “Everybody keeps experimenting with the mix,” Burt said, “but there are some things you know are good sellers, like diet stories, or a good medical story that affects everybody....Bible stories are also a staple.”

TV & CELEBRITIES

“Back in the 1970s,” Burt continued, “there was the traditional tabloid mix of health, love, money, celebrity, plus the psychic bit. But it’s changed. It’s only since the tabloids started getting really good color that they really promoted the main picture, and now that’s always a celebrity.”

Half of all Americans over the age of 55 have no teeth.

• Burt recalled earlier days of tabloids when part of the mix was to feed off popular television shows. He felt it was one of the key components that made the
Enquirer
and others so successful. “That was when television was at its peak and you had the celebrities. You had Charlie’s Angels and every week you could rotate Farrah Fawcett, Jaclyn Smith, Cheryl Ladd, Kate Jackson. Look at Joan Collins.
Dynasty
and all these major soaps had millions of people watch every week, and they really wanna know what’s going on in the stars’ lives. Do they screw around like they do on the show?”

• The arrival of cable TV has so diluted this once lucrative pool of recognizable celebrities that tabloids have had to work hard to find stars to take their places. But the pickings are slim. In the ’80s and ’90s “tabloid TV” began to reverse the trend and feed off the supermarket tabloids. Almost every day tabs are called up by producers of shows like
Hard Copy, Inside Edition
and A
Current Affair.
Ironically, calls come in just as often from the network news shows.

REVERSE LOGIC

“The tabs used to feed off television. Now television’s feeding off the tabloids.
Nightline
—Ted Koppel gets his best ratings, 20/20 gets their best ratings, when they do tabloid stories. Of course the greatest thing is to hold [the tabloid] up and say, ‘Look at this piece of s—t. We would never do a story like this.’ And then they repeat the story!” Burt said.

•
“The Examiner
once ran a story about Randy Travis possibly being gay. He was on
Entertainment Tonight
with Mary Hart, saying, ‘I’m not gay,’ but he gives them a full interview. They show the cover of the paper and that says he is gay. They ask him if he is gay and he says he’s not gay. But they perpetuate the whole bloody thing. If it’s libel then what are they doing going around repeating the libel?!”

• Because of the dearth of sure-selling TV characters, tabloids have had to search for their stories where they’ve always been—whatever interests the reader. Inevitably, readers turn to tabloids for comfort and titillation. They go there to be assured the world outside is worse than they can imagine and that, in the end, a humdrum life doesn’t mean they’re a failure.

Consensus reality is really reality, after all.

Slow food: The average French citizen eats 500 snails a year.

THE TOP 10 HITS OF THE YEAR, 1980-1983

Yet another installment of BRI’s Top Ten of the Year list.

1980

(1) Call Me —
Blondie

(2) Another Brick In The Wall
—Pink Floyd

(3) Rock With You
—Michael Jackson

(4) Magic —
Olivia Newton-John

(5) Crazy Little Thing Called Love
—Queen

(6) Do That One More Time
—Captain & Tennile

(7) Coming Up —
Paul McCartney