Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (20 page)

BOAT!
In 2008 the town of Eyemouth, Scotland, held a toy-boatbuilding contest. The winner: the one that stayed afloat the longest. The catch: All boats had to be made entirely from edible materials. Entrants included a boat made of apples, marshmallows, and strawberries; a trimaran of red pepper, carrot, and licorice root; and a canoe made from an eggplant, with two eggs as cargo. The boats were launched into the waves at Eyemouth Beach. Several hours later, a boat made from sheets of lasagna was declared the most seaworthy, and a sailboat made of chocolate cake won the prize for best overall. (Neither, however, was eaten afterward.)

SAKE BOTTLE!
In 2009 officials in the town of Takahama on Honshu Island, Japan, announced the establishment of the “Committee to Reinstate the Sake Bottle Squid.” They were referring to
Ika Tokkuri,
traditional Japanese sake bottles made from the skins of squid that are stuffed with rice, molded into bottle form, and allowed to dry. Not only are they edible after use—but it gives the sake a tantalizing bit of squid flavoring. (Mmmm!) The bottles can be used five or six times before eating.

LP!
Peter Lardong lost his job at a brewery in Berlin, Germany, in the 1980s, and during his time off decided to make some LPs (as in long-playing records)…out of food. He tried, usually with butter, ice cream, cola, beer, and even sausages, but “none of these things quite made it.” Then he tried chocolate: He made a mold of a record, melted chocolate, poured it into the mold, put it in the refrigerator overnight, and in the morning—voilà! The chocolate record actually played. Lardong now sells his chocolate LPs for about $6 apiece, and a Japanese company recently expressed interest in purchasing the patent.

“Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.”
—Rumi

In Canada, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are called “Reese” Peanut Butter Cups.

UNCLE JOHN’S
PAGE OF LISTS

Some random bits from the BRI’s bottomless trivia files
.

THE NATIONAL SAFETY COUNCIL’S 6 MOST LIKELY WAYS TO DIE

1.
Heart disease (Odds: 1 in 6)

2.
Cancer (1 in 7)

3.
Stroke (1 in 28)

4.
Car accident (1 in 85)

5.
Intentional self-harm (1 in 115)

6.
Accidental poisoning (1 in 139)

WORLD’S 3 MOST POPULAR SPECTATOR SPORTS

1.
Soccer

2.
Cricket

3.
Volleyball

4 BEERS FROM TV CARTOONS

1.
Pawtucket Patriot Ale (
Family Guy
)

2.
Duff (
The Simpsons
)

3.
Alamo (
King of the Hill
)

4.
Bendërbrau (
Futurama
)

ONLY 9 MEN TO APPEAR ON THE COVER OF
PLAYBOY
(SO FAR)

1.
Peter Sellers

2.
Burt Reynolds

3.
Steve Martin

4.
Donald Trump

5.
Dan Aykroyd

6.
Jerry Seinfeld

7.
Leslie Nielsen

8.
Gene Simmons

9.
Seth Rogen

THE 6 RICHEST U.S. PRESIDENTS (ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION)

1.
John F. Kennedy ($1 billion)

2.
George Washington ($525 million)

3.
Thomas Jefferson ($212 million)

4.
Teddy Roosevelt ($125 million)

5.
Andrew Jackson ($119 million)

6.
James Madison ($101 million)

THE 3 MOST PERFORMED HIGH SCHOOL PLAYS

1.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(Shakespeare)

2.
Rumors
(Neil Simon)

3.
The Crucible
(Arthur Miller)

6 OFFICIAL LANGUAGES OF THE U.N.

1.
Chinese

2.
Russian

3.
Spanish

4.
English

5.
French

6.
Arabic

5 PLACES THAT ARE OPEN ON CHRISTMAS

1.
John Deere World Headquarters

2.
Greater Vancouver Zoo

3.
Disney World

4.
The theaters of Branson, Missouri

5.
Yellowstone National Park

Sigmund Freud’s daughter Anna was Marilyn Monroe’s therapist.

SALEM WITCH TRIALS:
THE FUNGUS THEORY

More than three centuries after the end of the Salem witch trials, they continue to defy explanation. In the mid-1970s, a college undergraduate developed a new theory. Does it hold water? Read on and decide for yourself
.

S
EASON OF THE WITCH

In the bleak winter of 1692, the people of Salem, Massachusetts, hunkered down in their cabins and waited for spring. It was a grim time: There was no fresh food or vegetables, just dried meat and roots to eat. Their mainstay was the coarse bread they baked from the rye grain harvested in the fall.

Shortly after the New Year, the madness began. Elizabeth Parris, 9-year-old daughter of the local preacher, and her cousin, 11-year-old Abigail Williams, suffered from violent fits and convulsions. They lapsed into incoherent rants, had hallucinations, complained of crawly sensations on their skin, and often retreated into dull-eyed trances. Their desperate families turned to the local doctor, who could find nothing physically wrong with them. At his wit’s end, he decided there was only one reasonable explanation: witchcraft.

BLAME GAME

Word spread like wildfire through the village: An evil being was hexing the children. Soon, more “victims” appeared, most of them girls under the age of 20. The terrified villagers started pointing fingers of blame, first at an old slave named Tituba, who belonged to the Reverend Parris, then to old women like Sarah Good and Sarah Osborn. The arrests began on February 29; the trials soon followed. That June, 60-year-old Bridget Bishop was the first to be declared guilty of witchcraft and the first to hang. By September, 140 “witches” had been arrested and 19 had been executed. Many of the accused barely escaped the gallows by running into the woods and hiding. Then, sometime over the summer, the demonic fits stopped—and the frenzy of accusation and counter-accusation stopped with them. As passions cooled, the villagers tried to put their community back together again.

At one point in British history, you could be hanged for “impersonating an Egyptian.”

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

What happened to make these otherwise dour Puritans turn on each other with such a destructive frenzy? Over the centuries several theories have been put forth, from the Freudian—that the witch hunt was the result of hysterical tension resulting from centuries of sexual repression—to the exploitive—that it was fabricated as an excuse for a land grab (the farms and homes of all of the victims and many of the accused were confiscated and redistributed to other members of the community). But researchers had never been able to find real evidence to support these theories. Then in the 1970s, a college student in California made a deduction that seemed to explain everything.

In 1976 Linnda Caporael, a psychology major at U.C. Santa Barbara, was told to choose a subject for a term paper in her American History course. Having just seen a production of Arthur Miller’s play
The Crucible
(a fictional account of the Salem trials), she decided to write about the witch hunt. “As I began researching,” she later recalled, “I had one of those ‘a-ha!’ experiences.” The author of one of her sources said he remained at a loss to explain the hallucinations of the villagers of Salem. “It was the word ‘hallucinations’ that made everything click,” said Caporael. Years before, she’d read of a case of ergot poisoning in France where the victims had suffered from hallucinations, and she thought there might be a connection.

THE FUNGUS AMONG US

Ergot is a fungus that infects rye, a grain more commonly used in past centuries to bake bread than it is today. One of the byproducts present in ergot-infected rye is
ergotamine,
which is related to LSD. Toxicologists have known for years that eating bread baked with ergot-contaminated rye can trigger convulsions, delusions, creepy-crawly sensations of the skin, vomiting…and hallucinations. And historians were already aware that the illness caused by ergot poisoning (known as St. Anthony’s Fire) was behind several incidents of mass insanity in medieval Europe. Caporael wondered if the same conditions might have been present in Salem.

Frank Sinatra once said rock ’n’ roll was only played by “cretinous goons.”

They were. Ergot needs warm, damp weather to grow, and those conditions were rife in the fields around Salem in 1691. Rye was the primary grain grown, so there was plenty of it to be infected. Caporael also discovered that most of the accusers lived on the west side of the village, where the fields were chronically marshy, making them a perfect breeding ground for the fungus. The crop harvested in the fall of 1691 would’ve been baked and eaten during the following winter, which was when the fits of madness began. However, the next summer was unusually dry, which could explain the sudden stop to the bewitchments. No ergot, no madness.

SHE RESTS HER CASE

Caporael continued to research her theory as she pursued her Ph.D., publishing her findings in 1976 in the journal
Science,
which brought her support from the scientific community and attention from the news media. Caporael has been careful to say that her theory only accounts for the
initial
cause of the Salem witch hunts. As the frenzy grew in scope and consequence, she’s convinced that the actual sequence of events probably included not only real moments of mass hysteria but also some overacting on the part of the accusers (motivated as much by fear of being accused themselves as by any actual malice toward the accused).

OTHER POSSIBILITIES

Caporael’s theory remains one of the most convincing explanations for what started the madness that tore apart the village of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692…but there are others.

•
Encephalitis Lethargica
.
Historian Laurie Win Carlson compared the symptoms of the accused in Salem (violent fits, trance or coma-like states) with those experienced by victims of an outbreak of
Encephalitis Lethargica,
an acute inflammation of the brain, between 1915 and 1926. The trials were likely “a response to unexplained physical and neurological behaviors resulting from an epidemic of encephalitis,” she says.

• Jimson Weed.
This toxic weed, sometimes called devil’s trumpet or locoweed, grows wild in Massachusetts. Ingesting it can cause hallucinations, delirium, and bizarre behavior.

2010 study: 33% of U.S. workers are chronically overworked. (10% are unemployed.)

ONCE UPON A TIME…

What’s the most important part of a good story? The first line—a great one will leave you anxious to read more. Here are some great opening lines from famous books
.

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

—George Orwell,
1984

“All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion.”

—Leo Tolstoy,
Anna Karenina

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”