Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader (61 page)

Later, experimenting with his toilet, he learned the force of the water from the water tank high above the toilet propelled the excrement across the large spoon-shaped depression and over the rim of the toilet, especially when the seat was up. What a puzzling way to construct a toilet.

But why? A Russian friend helpfully explained that this toilet design was developed in the late 1800s, supposedly so that the depression could collect excrement for easy removal to the Russian fields for use as “night soil” fertilizer. The sole purpose of the water flush, the friend reported, was to rinse and clean the bowl after the excrement was manually removed.

Tall story or not, my friend in Moscow devised a way to deal manually with the spitting toilet, but how I will not reveal. I leave it to imaginative readers to ponder how they would solve my Moscow friend’s toilet problem.

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“Never take no for an answer from somebody who doesn’t have the authority to say yes.”

—Anonymous

Here’s another batch of too-good-to-be-true stories that are floating around. Have you heard any of them?

T
HE STORY:
Firefighters cleaning up the scene of a California forest fire are shocked to find the charred remains of a scuba diver hanging from the limbs of a burnt tree. An autopsy reveals that the cause of death was massive internal injuries sustained from a fall. An investigation reveals that he was diving off a nearby coast on the day of the fire...and was scooped up into a bucket of sea-water being carried by a firefighting helicopter.

THE FACTS:
The story, which sometimes involves a fisherman still clutching his fishing pole, has been around since at least 1987. It falls into one of the most popular urban legend categories of all: “What a stupid/unusual way to die!” (It’s even popular in France, which has also been cited as the location of the incident.)

THE STORY:
After playing a round of golf, a man with a habit of chewing his golf tee between holes complains he isn’t feeling well. He checks into a hospital, and a few days later he dies. An autopsy reveals that insecticide from the golf course tainted the tee he was chewing, and poisoned him.

THE FACTS:
This one is actually true. In 1982, Navy Lieutenant George M. Prior played two rounds of golf at the Army-Navy Country Club in Arlington, Virginia. By the time he finished, he was complaining of a headache; that night he checked into the hospital with nausea, fever, and a severe rash. He died ten days later. An autopsy determined that he died from an extreme allergic reaction to the pesticide used on the golf course.

THE STORY:
The Red Cross conducts a volunteer blood drive at a local high school...and discovers that 20% of the student body tested positive for HIV.

THE FACTS:
The rumor has been traced back to 1987, when it worked its way around the country, “attaching itself to whichever high school had just hosted a blood drive.” Teenage fear of the adverse consequences of sexual activity, coupled with parents’ fear that their children are having sex, keeps this one alive.

Actually, between 1985 and 1996, the Red Cross tested 1.6 million samples of donated blood for HIV. Only 28 of these donors tested positive for HIV; of the 28, only one was a high school student.

THE STORY:
A truck driver loses the brakes on his 18-wheeler while driving down a steep hill. He somehow manages to avoid hitting any cars and finally turns off onto an emergency exit ramp... where he runs over a picnicking family that has mistaken the emergency ramp for a rest stop.

THE FACTS:
It never happened—but it’s a good example of a classic urban legend theme: the tragedy is narrowly averted, only to result in a much bigger tragedy.

THE STORY:
A woman buys a pair of shrink-to-fit jeans. Rather than shrink them in the washing machine, she puts them on and soaks with them in the tub, hoping they’ll contour perfectly to her body. But they shrink so much that they crush her to death.

THE FACTS:
It started with a TV commercial. In the mid-1980s, Levi’s ran an ad for shrink-to-fit 501 jeans in which a man climbs into a tub with jeans on and soaks until they fit perfectly. The rumors started flying soon afterward.

This legend is an example of one of the most popular themes of all: the ridiculous fashion trend that kills. In the sixties, the “fatal fashion” was beehive hairdos filled with black widow spider nests; in the eighties, it was men stuffing cucumbers down the fronts of their tight pants, only to drop dead on the disco dance floor from lack of circulation.

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“
Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them.
”

—
Adlai Stevenson
             

Another page of tidbits dug up by the erstwhile Tim Harrower while surfing the Internet.

SPECIAL WORDS

The longest word you can spell without repeating a letter:
Uncopyrightable.

The longest word with just one vowel:
Strengths
.

The only English word with a triple letter:
Goddessship.

Longest commonly-used word with no letter appearing more than once:
Ambidextrously.

The word with the longest definition, in most dictionaries:
Set.

The longest common word without an a, e, i, o, or u:
Rhythms.

The shortest
-ology
(study of) word:
oology
(the study of eggs).

The only two common words with six consonants in a row:
Catchphrase
and
latchstring.

The longest English word with letters appearing in alphabetical order:
Aegilops
(an ulcer in the eye—we’ve never heard of it, either).

UGLY WORDS

According to a poll by the National Association of Teachers of Speech, the ten worst-sounding words in the English language are:
Cacophony, Crunch, Flatulent, Gripe, Jazz Phlegmatic, Plump, Plutocrat Sap, Treachery.

MULTI-PURPOSE SYLLABLE

You can pronounce
-ough
eight different ways in the following sentence: A
rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed!

LEARN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Taxi
is spelled the same way in nine languages:
English, French, Danish, Dutch, German, Swedish, Spanish, Norwegian, and Portuguese.

EXCEPTIONAL WORD

Of
is the only word in which an “
f
” is pronounced like a “
v
”

Some observations from one of America’s richest men—Warren Buffet.

“That which is not worth doing is not worth doing well.”

“If at first you succeed, quit trying.”

“In the end, I always believe my eyes rather than anything else.”

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”

“Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”

“The only way to slow down is to stop.”

“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”

“If principles can become dated, they’re not principles.”

“I keep an
internal
scoreboard. If I do something that others don’t like but I feel good about,

I’m happy. If others praise something I’ve done, but I’m not satisfied, I feel unhappy.”

“I remember asking that question [How does he define friendship?] of a woman who had survived Auschwitz. She said her test was, ‘Would they hide me?”’

“With enough insider information and a million dollars, you can go broke in a year.”

“What I am is a
realist.
I always knew I’d like what I’m doing. Oh, perhaps it would have been nice to be a major league baseball player, but that’s where the realism comes in.”

“Wall Street is the only place that people ride to work in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.”

“I want to explain my mistakes. This means I do only the things I completely understand.”

Here are more stories behind the creation of some of the world’s most popular comic strips.

B
LONDIE

Background:
Blondie is the most popular “family” comic strip in the world, appearing in 55 countries and 2,200 newspapers. But it started out in 1930 with a very different story line. The stars were Blondie Boopadoop, a gold digger looking for a rich husband, and Dagwood Bumstead—who was, believe it or not, “a playboy, party animal, and polo player,” and heir to the Bumstead railroad fortune. Dagwood spent most of his time partying and chasing Blondie.

A Strip Is Born:
As the Depression got more severe, the company that distributed “Blondie” to newspapers worried that rich airheads wouldn’t amuse people anymore. They told the strip’s creator, Chic Young, to “go back to the drawing board and start over” with something readers could relate to. He did. In 1933, Dagwood and Blondie surprised everyone by falling in love. Dagwood’s parents objected to their marriage...and disinherited him. Result: He had to get a job, which made the Bumsteads “common folk.” From then on, the jokes could be about the problems of ordinary life—getting up for work, missing the bus, pleasing the boss, making ends meet, etc.

CATHY

Background:
In 1976, at age 26, Cathy Guisewite was already a VP at an ad agency...but she was 50 pounds overweight and not terribly happy. One night, as she waited for a boyfriend to call, she realized “how pathetic” she’d become. She drew a few humorous pictures of herself eating junk food, waiting at the phone, and sent them to her mother.

Soon, she was sending these “illustrated versions of my anxieties” to her parents regularly. “Instead of writing in my diary,” she says, “I
sort of started summing up my life—my pathetic moments in pictures—and sending them home.”

A Strip Is Born:
Her parents saved the drawings and eventually suggested she try to sell them as a comic strip. “My mother had always taught me to write about things instead of talking to anyone,” Guise-wite says. ‘“If you’re angry,’ she’d say, ‘don’t scream at the person. Write about it. If you’re hurt or jealous, don’t go gossiping to girlfriends. Write about it. If you’re lonely or sad or depressed, write about it.’ Try to imagine my horror when—after a lifetime of teaching me to keep my feelings private—she insisted my drawings were the makings of a comic strip for millions of people to read.”

Her timing couldn’t have been better. Universal Press Syndicate had been looking for a strip dealing with women’s issues, and this one, they said, was the first that had “some feeling, some soul.” They bought the strip and named the main character after its author. Today, Guisewite says, “If I had ever had any idea how many people would one day be reading it, I would never have agreed to name her Cathy.”

GARFIELD

Background:
Jim Davis was too sickly to work on the family farm in Indiana, so his mother kept him supplied with pencils and paper and encouraged him to draw. When he graduated from college, he got a job as assistant to Tom Ryan, creator of the syndicated comic strip “Tumbleweeds.”

A Strip Is Born:
A few years later, Davis went to New York to sell his own strip—“Gnorm Gnat,” about an insect. It was turned down. “They told me nobody could identify with a bug,” Davis says. He looked for a subject people
could
identify with and noticed there were lots of dogs in successful comic strips—Snoopy, Marmaduke, Belvedere—but almost no cats.

So he decided to fashion a cat character after his “big, opinionated, stubborn” grandfather, James Garfield Davis, and sold it to United Features. The strip debuted on June 19, 1978, in 41 newspapers. During the 1980s, Garfield merchandising became a billion-dollar-a-year industry. For example, between 1987 and 1989, 225 million of those suction-cupped Garfield dolls sold.

BRI member Jessica Vineyard contributed this illuminating piece on some astronomical basics. Perfect for reading by flashlight when you’re out at night stargazing.