Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (39 page)

•
Kevin Bacon
was an appropriate 20 years old when he played a college student in 1978’s
Animal House
. Six years later, at age 26, he starred in
Footloose,
playing a high-school student.

The world’s first clone: a tadpole, created in 1952.

BIG BROTHER 2.0

Uh-oh. Looks like a big road block ahead on the information superhighway
.

Y
OU DON’T OWN ME
Until recently, when you bought a song from the Apple iTunes Store, it wasn’t your property to do with as you pleased. Because of music piracy concerns, Apple embedded mp3s with “Digital Rights Management” code, or DRM, which prevents the song from being played on more than five devices. That means that you can’t share DRM-coded songs with friends. It also means that if you copy downloaded songs to a CD, they won’t play on many stereos, such as a car CD player. Apple now sells DRM-free music, but any music purchased before 2009 is still restricted. (You must pay Apple 30 cents per song to remove the DRM.)

SOME DAY MY PRINTS WILL COME

Do you work in an office with one of those big printer/fax/copiers? If it was manufactured after 2002, it’s digitally enabled, meaning it has a computer hard drive, and on that hard drive is an image of every single document ever scanned, faxed, or copied on it. So if you made a photocopy of your tax return, Social Security card, passport, credit card bill, paystub, or any other sensitive document—it’s still on the copier. There are about 25 industrial printer resalers in the U.S., where anyone can buy a used printer for about $400. With some easily obtained software and a screwdriver, that sensitive information can be unlocked—and potentially exploited by identify thieves—in just a few hours.

YOUR SEARCHES LIVE FOREVER

Ever searched Google for something you wanted to keep secret, like a medical issue or a surprise birthday present? No problem. You can always just delete the search history on your computer and it’s gone, right? Wrong. That just deletes it from your browser’s history. Google still has a record of
everything
you (and everyone else) has ever used its service to research online. Everything from “burning sensation” to “stylish adult diapers” is stored on Google’s electronic servers along with information that shows exactly what computer made the embarrassing search. (Ouch.)

First movie star to live in Beverly Hills: Douglas Fairbanks.

DON’T DRINK AND _______

Actual emergency room reports involving people who had too much to drink
.

Exercise.
“Injured shoulder in cartwheel race, admits drinking alcohol.”

Target practice.
“Patient was drinking when friends shot him in back of head with BB gun. Has lump on head; thinks BB is still in his head.”

Sit near a pool table.
“Patient fell off a bar stool and hit head on a pool table in a bar.”

Play golf.
“Patient was intoxicated in golf cart, flipped out of the cart onto head.”

Practice martial arts.
“Patient drinking, practicing karate. Kicked in the mouth.”

Do home repairs.
“Laceration rt. index finger: Patient was working on his toilet while drinking alcohol.”

Skateboard.
“Patient, intoxicated, fell skateboarding down stairs.”

Water ski.
“Drinking while water skiing; ran into a dock in the river.”

Poop.
“Elbow fracture: Patient was sitting on the toilet, reached for a glass of wine she was drinking and fell off toilet.”

Travel.
“Patient was intoxicated on his mobility scooter, trying to cross the street. Fell off.”

Fly.
“Knee pain: Patient was flying a kite when kite lifted him 15 feet off the ground and then dropped him. Intoxicated.”

Ride.
“Patient was riding his bike and texting on his cell phone and crashed the bike—also had been drinking.”

Sit.
“Drinking 6 beers a day, unable to get off couch.”

Lose things.
“Patient was looking for his cell phone and fell into some brush; lacerated right knee. Smells of alcohol.”

Eat.
“Patient found intoxicated at McDonald’s, pant leg on fire.”

Walt Disney World goes through about 194,871 miles of toilet paper each year.

A HISTORY OF THE
SHOPPING MALL, PART II

Love ’em or hate ’em, it’s hard to deny the role that shopping malls have played in American life over the past 50 years. Here’s Part II of our story. (Part I is on
page 99
.)

W
ORST-LAID PLANS
Though Victor Gruen is credited with being the “father of the mall,” he owes a lot to the North Korean Communists for helping him get his temples of consumerism off the ground. He owes the Commies (and so do you, if you like going to the mall) because as Gruen himself would later admit, his earliest design for the proposed Eastland Center was
terrible
. Had the Korean War not put the brakes on all nonessential construction projects, Eastland might have been built as Gruen originally designed it, before he could develop his ideas further.

Those early plans called for a jumble of nine detached buildings organized around a big oval parking lot. The parking lot was split in two by a sunken four-lane roadway, and if pedestrians wanted to cross from one half of the shopping center to the other, the only way to get over the moat-like roadway was by means of a scrawny footbridge that was 300 feet long. How many shoppers would even have bothered to cross over to the other side?

Had Eastland Center been built according to Gruen’s early plans, it almost certainly would have been a financial disaster. Even if it didn’t bankrupt Hudson’s, it probably would have forced the company to scrap its plans for Northland, Westland, and Southland Centers. Other developers would have taken note, and the shopping mall as we know it might never have come to be.

ALL IN A ROW

Shopping centers of the size of Eastland Center were such a new concept that
no
architect had figured out how to build them well. Until now, most shopping centers consisted of a small number of stores in a single strip facing the street, set back far enough to allow room for parking spaces in front of the stores. Some larger developments had two parallel strips of stores, with the storefronts facing inward toward each other across an area of landscaped grass called a “mall.” That’s how shopping malls got their name.

Does it have GPS? A platypus swims with its eyes, ears, and nostrils closed.

There had been a few attempts to build even larger shopping centers, but nearly all had lost money. In 1951 a development called Shoppers’ World opened outside of Boston. It had more than 40 stores on two levels and was anchored by a department store at the south end of the mall. But the smaller stores had struggled from the day the shopping center opened, and when they failed they took the entire shopping center (and the developer, who filed for bankruptcy) down with them.

INSIDE OUT

Gruen needed more time to think through his ideas, and when the Korean War pushed the Eastland project off into the indefinite future, he got it. Hudson’s eventually decided to build Northland first, and by the time Gruen started working on those plans in 1951, his thoughts on what a shopping center should look like had changed completely. The question of where to put all the parking spaces (Northland would have more than 8,000) was one problem. Gruen eventually decided that it made more sense to put the parking spaces around the shopping center, instead of putting the shopping center around the parking spaces, as his original plans for Eastland Center had called for.

WALK THIS WAY

Gruen then put the Hudson’s department store right in the middle of the development, surrounded on three sides by the smaller stores that made up the rest of the shopping center. Out beyond these smaller stores was the parking lot, which meant that the only way to get from the parking lot to Hudson’s—the shopping center’s biggest draw—was by walking past the smaller shops.

This may not sound like a very important detail, but it turned out to be key to the mall’s success. Forcing all that foot traffic past the smaller shops—increasing their business in the process—was the thing that made the small stores financially viable. Northland Center was going to have nearly 100 small stores; they all needed to be successful for the shopping center itself to succeed.

The average American adult buys 7 pairs of underwear and 9 pairs of socks per year.

SUBURBAN OUTFITTER

Northland was an outdoor shopping center, with nearly everything a modern enclosed mall has…except the roof. Another feature that set it apart from other shopping centers of the era, besides its layout, its massive scale, and the large number of stores in the development, were the bustling public spaces between the rows of stores. In the past developers who had incorporated grassy malls into their shopping centers did so with the intention of giving the projects a rural, almost sleepy feel, similar to a village green.

Gruen, a native of Vienna, Austria, thought just the opposite was needed. He wanted his public spaces to blend with the shops to create a lively (and admittedly idealized)
urban
feel, just like he remembered from downtown Vienna, with its busy outdoor cafés and shops. He divided the spaces between Hudson’s and the other stores into separate and very distinct areas, giving them names like Peacock Terrace, Great Lakes Court, and Community Lane. He filled them with landscaping, fountains, artwork, covered walkways, and plenty of park benches to encourage people to put the spaces to use.

NOVELTY STORES

If Northland Center were to open its doors today, it would be remarkably
un
remarkable. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of similarly-sized malls all over the United States. But when Northland opened in the spring of 1954, it was one-of-a-kind, easily the largest shopping center on Earth, both in terms of square footage and the number of stores in the facility.
The Wall Street Journal
dispatched a reporter to cover the grand opening. So did
Time
and
Newsweek,
and many other newspapers and magazines. In the first weeks that the Northland Center was open, an estimated 40-50,000 people passed through its doors each day.

DON’T LOOK NOW

It was an impressive start, but Hudson’s executives still worried. Did all these people really come to shop, or just look around? Would they ever be back? No one knew for sure if the public would even feel comfortable in such a huge facility. People were used to shopping in one store, not having to choose from nearly 100. And there was a very real fear that for many shoppers, finding their way back to their car in the largest parking lot they had ever parked in would be too great a strain and they’d never come back. Even worse, what if Northland Center was
too
good? What if the public enjoyed the public spaces so much that they never bothered to go inside the stores? With a price tag of nearly $25 million, the equivalent of more than $200 million today, Northland Center was one of the most expensive retail developments in history, and nobody even knew if it would work.

Chickens are omnivores—they’ll eat lizards and mice if they’re available.

CHA-CHING!

Whatever fears the Hudson’s executives had about making back their $25 million investment evaporated when their own store’s sales exceeded forecasts by 30 percent. The numbers for the smaller stores were good, too, and they stayed good month after month. In its first year in business Northland Center grossed $88 million, making it one of the most profitable shopping centers in the United States. And all of the press coverage generated by the construction of Northland Center made Gruen’s reputation. Before the center was even finished, he received the commission of a lifetime: Dayton’s department store hired him to design not just the world’s first
enclosed
shopping mall but an entire planned community around it, on a giant 463-acre plot in a suburb of Minneapolis.

For Part III of the story, go past the food court, up the escalator, right after Spencer’s Gifts, and on to
page 399
.

EASY RIDER

“A 40-year-old man was stopped by police and charged for not wearing a helmet while riding his motorcycle this past weekend in Hamilton. He also wasn’t wearing pants, or underwear. Police tried to stop the nearly-nude motorcyclist—he was wearing a T-shirt—around 4 a.m. Sunday. When he spotted the officers, he lost control of his bike, managed to steady himself and then took off. Authorities managed to catch up with him a short time later. ‘It is kind of bizarre,’ said Staff Sgt. David Hennick.”