Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (33 page)

Song:
(I Can’t Get No) “Satisfaction” (1965)

Musician:
Rolling Stones

Story:
Keith Richards claims that the riff came to him in a dream, and that he envisioned it being played by a horn section. But when he played it on a guitar with some fuzz effects, he realized that the fuzzy sound provided the gritty undertone “Satisfaction” needed. (And the guitar he played it on was missing the lowest string.)

Song:
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” (1991)

Musician:
Nirvana

Story:
This riff is played in a minor key, with Kurt Cobain’s guitar tuned down to make it sound more menacing, and it drove the song that would bring alternative rock and grunge into the mainstream. But the riff came from a very mainstream source—on numerous occasions, Cobain hinted that he simply reworked the chorus riff of the 1976 Boston classic-rock radio staple “More Than a Feeling.”

Song:
“Crazy Train” (1980)

Musician:
Ozzy Osbourne

Story:
The entire song was written and arranged by Osbourne…except the opening riff. That was the creation of his lead guitarist,
Randy Rhoads. Rhoads listened to a looped tape of the song’s drum, rhythm guitar, bass, and vocal tracks over and over for hours. While he did, he sat and composed, note by note, the intricate, rapid-fire introduction to the song.

Site of first major gold strike in the U.S.: the tiny town of Dahlonega, GA (1828).

Song:
“Layla” (1970)

Musician:
Derek and the Dominos

Story:
It’s probably Eric Clapton’s most famous guitar work in a career full of memorable licks, but it was written by another major ’70s rock guitarist: Duane Allman. He took the vocal melody from blues musician Albert King’s “As the Years Go By,” changed the key, and sped it up. That’s it.

Song:
“Sunshine of Your Love” (1967)

Musician:
Cream

Story:
Another riff that has “defined” Clapton, but that he didn’t write. Bassist Jack Bruce came up with it. His inspiration: a Jimi Hendrix concert. “I love walking into a guitar shop to hear kids playing what is essentially a bass riff,” Bruce said.

Song:
“Misirlou” (1962)

Musician:
Dick Dale and the Del-Tones

Story:
“Misirlou” is an old Greek folk song, but the melody is better known as Dick Dale’s blisteringly fast 1962 surf-rock instrumental (made famous again when it was used in the opening credits of
Pulp Fiction
). It came about when a fan at a show bet Dale that he couldn’t play an entire song on one string. He could.

Song:
“Sweet Child o’ Mine” (1988)

Musician:
Guns N’ Roses

Story:
Guitarist Slash was noodling around on his guitar one day when he struck on a high-pitched, circular melody. As he kept playing it over and over, the band’s other guitarist, Izzy Stradlin, joined in, adding a chord progression. Unbeknownst to them, singer Axl Rose was upstairs, heard it, and started writing lyrics to the melody. The next day at rehearsal, Rose unveiled “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” written around a riff Slash and Stradlin had already forgotten.

Earthworms have two sets of muscles: one set for stretching, one set for contracting.

TURTLE STORIES

Former Harvard University president James Bryant Conant famously said, “Behold the turtle—he makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.” Uncle John adds: “He also gives us some great bathroom reading
.”

T
WO FOR ONE

What has six legs, two heads, and one shell? Cheech and Chong—a star attraction at the Venice Beach Freakshow in California. Born in 2009, the conjoined red-eared slider turtles were purchased by the Freakshow when they were two months old. According to the show’s owner, Todd Ray, caring for Cheech and Chong—now about the size of a fist—is a daily challenge. “Because there are two distinct personalities, they often want to go two separate ways. This can end up in a battle that causes them to flip over and they can’t flip themselves back.” For that reason, Ray keeps them in shallow water so they won’t drown when they get upside down. Cheech and Chong aren’t unique at the Freakshow—there are several other multi-headed critters, including Myrtle, Squirtle, and Thirdle, the world’s only known
three
-headed turtle.

A PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNEY

In 2010 U.S. Coast Guard agent Paul Shultz found a camera washed up on the shore in Key West, Florida. He removed it from its waterproof casing, loaded the memory card into his computer, and saw photos of various sites on the Caribbean island of Aruba. There were also some shots of two men preparing to scuba dive and some video footage of the divers exploring a shipwreck. The final file on the card was a shaky video of water, then sky, then some fish, then a sea turtle’s flipper, then water, then sky, then the flipper…over and over for several minutes. “At first I thought someone was getting attacked by a sea creature,” said Shultz. But then he figured out what must have happened: A sea turtle caught the camera strap on its flipper and took it for a ride. It also somehow managed to turn the camera on and record part of the camera’s 1,100-mile journey. Shultz posted the photos on some travel websites along with a message asking if anyone knew who the camera belonged to. A woman in Aruba recognized one of the men—a photographer named Dick de Bruin. It turned out that he’d lost the camera six months earlier while shooting the shipwreck. The camera was returned, and the sea turtle’s travel footage has become a YouTube hit, with over 2.3 million views…and counting.

Yale study: Having a “bad-hair day” really can negatively affect your whole day.

DAMN THEE TO SHELL

Before the fire, Lucky looked like any other red-eared slider. But after flames tore through the A-Dora-ble Pet Shop in Frankfort, Indiana, in 2005, the palm-sized turtle was the only animal that survived. Then the store’s owner, Bryan Dora, noticed something strange. Apparently, the intense heat had caused much of Lucky’s shell to darken; the remaining orange markings looked just like…Satan. Complete with the horns, eyes, lips, and a goatee. “To me,” said Dora, “it’s too coincidental that the only thing to come out unscathed would have this image on it.” (To date, Lucky hasn’t been charged with arson.)

ON THE NO-FLY LIST

Ten-year-old Carly Helm’s father bought her a baby turtle—her first pet—when she and her two older sisters visited him in Atlanta in 2010. After Dad dropped the sisters off at the airport for their flight home to Milwaukee, Carly and her pet turtle (named Neytiri after the princess in
Avatar
) boarded the AirTran plane with no problem. But as it was taxiing to the runway, the plane turned around and drove back to the gate. That’s when Carly was informed that turtles aren’t allowed to fly AirTran due to their risk of salmonella. The Helm sisters and Neytiri were escorted back to the terminal and told they could make arrangements for the turtle and take a later flight, but they couldn’t wait—they had to get home. So they called Dad, who agreed to drive back to the airport to pick up Neytiri if airport workers would care for the reptile for an hour. They refused and told Carly to “get rid of it.” With tears streaming down her face, she tossed Neytiri, cage and all, into a trash can. Then she reboarded and flew home. An hour later, Dad arrived at the airport but was told the trash had been emptied—the turtle was gone. Two days later, a delivery arrived at Carly’s house…it was Neytiri! Apparently, a ramp supervisor had found the turtle in the trash and taken it home, and AirTran officials arranged for it to be reunited with its rightful owner. At last report, Carly and Neytiri are living happily ever after.

Q. Why can’t frogs turn, lift, or lower their heads? A. No necks.

LA HISTORIO
DA ESPERANTO

Odds are you don’t speak it, but you’ve probably at least heard of Esperanto. It’s the most successful artificial or “constructed” language in history. Here’s the story of how—and why—it came to be
. Amuzigu!

B
ABEL

Eliezer Levi Samenhof was a Russian Jew growing up in the city of Bialystok (in modern-day Poland, then a part of the Russian Empire) in the 1870s. The majority of Bialystok’s citizens were Jews, but the city was also home to large numbers of ethnic Germans, Russians, and Poles who spoke their own languages and lived in their own distinct communities within the city. There was a lot of hostility between these groups and violence was not uncommon, something that Samenhof felt acutely as he was growing up. “I was raised to be an idealist,” he remembered years later. “I was taught about the brotherhood of all people. However, every time in the street and courtyard I was persuaded there are no people…only Russians, Poles, Germans and Jews. All of that tormented my spirit during childhood.”

POLYGLOT

Samenhof had a knack for languages; in addition to the Yiddish and Russian he spoke at home, he picked up German and Polish in the street. When his family moved to Warsaw in 1873, he studied English, French, Latin, and Greek at the city’s Secondary School of Languages. He also dabbled in Spanish, Italian, and Lithuanian.

This was a kid who spent
a lot
of time thinking about language. Not just about the languages themselves, but also about the role they played in dividing people. In a part of the world that had seen so much hostility between speakers of different languages, Samenhof wondered what the world would be like if everyone spoke the same language. Maybe, he thought, they’d come to see themselves as one single people, and the violence between communities would end.

Hailstorm capital of the United States: Tulsa, Oklahoma.

ALL TOGETHER NOW

People were never going to abandon their own native tongues; that much Samenhof understood. But what if all groups learned to speak a second language—an
international
language—in addition to their mother tongue? No such language existed, but if there was such a language, a Jew living in Bialystok wouldn’t have to learn Russian, Polish, and German just to speak to his neighbors, and they wouldn’t have to learn Yiddish to speak to him. Learning an international language would enable members of each group to speak with every other group.

Samenhof decided to create one. He figured he’d have to make it as simple as possible—who better to understand that than a student trying to master English, French, Latin, and Greek at the same time without confusing them with the four languages he spoke already? At first he thought a simplified version of Latin or Greek might work, but in time he decided that inventing a new language from scratch would be better.

TRIAL BY FIRE

Samenhof created his language not once, but twice. In December 1878, he was ready to demonstrate his first language—he called it
Lingwe Uniwersala
(“Universal Language”)—to his high-school friends. But when he went off to medical school in Moscow the following year, his father insisted that he leave his
Lingwe Uniwersala
notes at home. Then, while Samenhof was away at school, his father burned the notes. Only four lines of
Lingwe Uniwersala
text survive today.

By 1881 Samenhof was back in Warsaw to continue his medical education, and in his spare time he began to reconstruct his international language, drawing as much from
Lingwe Uniwersala
as he could remember and improving the parts he felt needed fixing. Over the next few years he finished school, set up a medical practice as an eye specialist, and kept tinkering away. If he gave any thought to giving up, the assassination of Czar Alexander II by Russian anarchists in March 1881 must have renewed his determination to finish the job: Alexander’s murder was followed by anti-Semitic riots or
pogroms
throughout the Russian Empire, including in Warsaw. If ever a universal language of brotherhood was needed, it was needed there and then.

The European Union’s annual cost for translating its speeches, publications, documents, signage, etc., into all 23 official languages: 1.25 billion Euros, or about $1.7 billion.

Samenhof—soon to “Esperantize” the spelling of his name to
Lazar Ludwik Zamenhof
—finished work on his language in 1885, but it wasn’t until he married into a wealthy family in 1887 that he had the money to publish the book that introduced it to the world. Perhaps because he feared being branded a crank, he published
Unua Libro
(“First Book”) under the pen name
Doktoro Esperanto
(“Doctor Hopeful”). That’s how the language came to be known as Esperanto.

EASY DOES IT

If you’ve ever struggled to learn Spanish or French, or had pity on a non-native speaker trying to master the exasperating peculiarities of English, there is much in Esperanto that may appeal to you:

• Zamenhof gave Esperanto a “one letter, one sound” alphabet: Each letter is pronounced one way and one way only. There are no silent letters, so every word is pronounced exactly as it looks.

• Words with two or more syllables are always pronounced with the accent on the second-to-last syllable.

• Forget about studying textbooks filled with grammatical rules—and long lists of exceptions to all the rules you just learned. Esperanto has only 16 rules of grammar; they take up less than two typed pages of text. Once you learn them, you’re done—there are
no
exceptions to any of the rules. No irregular nouns, no irregular verbs, no irregular pronunciation. No irregular anything.