Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (43 page)

•
TV BROADCAST:
The Super Bowl now generates millions in advertising revenue. It’s so lucrative that it actually rotates between the four major broadcast networks each year, whether they regularly air NFL games or not. In 1967 the Super Bowl aired on two networks. Reason: CBS had a contract to air NFL games; NBC had one to air AFL games. The championship was technically an NFL game
and
an AFL game, so both networks aired it, each with its own sportscasters. However, only CBS’s camera crew and live feed were used, because it was held in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, home to the Los Angeles Rams of the NFL—CBS territory.

U.S. sport with the most viewers: Pro football. Second-most: NASCAR.

•
TECHNICAL PROBLEMS:
A halftime ad ran too long and NBC missed the second-half kickoff. The network actually talked officials into redoing the kickoff once they were back on the air (which confused viewers watching the game on CBS).

•
COMMERCIALS:
Because the Super Bowl is almost always the most-watched single TV show of the year (the 2010 game was the most-watched American TV broadcast
of all time),
the networks can command huge fees for advertising. A 30-second spot at Super Bowl I cost $40,000, the equivalent of about $245,000 in today’s money. A 30-second spot at Super Bowl XLIV in 2010: $2.8 million.

•
POST GAME:
One of the spoils for each year’s broadcasting network is the opportunity to launch a new show or expose an existing show to a huge audience immediately after the game, and win a lot of new viewers.
Family Guy
and
Undercover Boss
both debuted after Super Bowls, and post-game episodes of
Friends, House,
and
The X Files
were those series’ most-watched ever. What aired after Super Bowl I? On CBS, it was a regularly scheduled episode of
Lassie
. NBC aired
Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color
. That night’s episode: part 2 (of 3) of “Willie and the Yank,” about a young Confederate soldier who befriends a Union soldier during the Civil War.

•
ATTENDANCE:
Super Bowl I is the only Super Bowl that wasn’t a sellout. The official attendance number for the game: 61,946…well under the 100,000-plus that regularly attended USC football home games in the same stadium.

•
TICKET PRICE:
The face value of a 2010 ticket was around $500, with scalpers and ticket brokers charging tens of thousands. Cost of a ticket to the 1967 game, of which there were more than 30,000 still available at game time: $12.

“Why do they lock gas station restrooms? Are they afraid someone will clean them?”

—George Carlin

Chameleons have five layers of color-changing skin.

FLYING BLIND

Imagine you’re driving your car down the highway and you suddenly lose your eyesight. Now imagine that same scenario—only you’re flying a plane
.

T
HE PREDICAMENT
On a bright November day in 2008, Jim O’Neill, a 65-year-old Cessna pilot, was flying solo from Scotland to Sheffield, England. All was going fine until about 40 minutes into the flight. Cruising at 5,000 feet over the English countryside, everything started to get blurry. At first O’Neill thought he’d been blinded by the sun. He rubbed his eyes, but the feeling didn’t pass. In fact, it was getting worse. He started to panic and immediately radioed for help: “Mayday! I can’t see the dials! It’s all a blur!”

Controllers at Full Sutton Airfield, near North Yorkshire, attempted to guide O’Neill to the runway. He flew right past it. Growing more stressed each minute, he sounded confused and his speech was slurred. That and the sudden blindness pointed to one thing: O’Neill had suffered a stroke.

THE WING MAN

The U.K.’s Royal Air Force overheard the mayday call and offered to send help. A few minutes later, Wing Commander Paul Gerrard, the chief flying instructor from nearby Linton-on-Ouse Base, flew his Tucano T1 turboprop plane to within a few hundred feet of the Cessna. “Mr. O’Neill,” he said over the radio, “I’m going to take you back to my base.” Gerrard then kept in constant contact with O’Neill for the 20-mile trip, giving him course corrections along the way: “Left a bit, right, descend, level, left.” (Gerrard had to fly in a zigzag pattern to keep from zooming past the much slower Cessna.) By the time the two planes reached Linton, O’Neill was having trouble keeping his composure. He kept apologizing for all the trouble he was causing and worried that he’d crash onto people on the ground. “Everything’s going to be fine, Jim. Just keep listening to me. Now, you’re above the airstrip, can you see it?”

“No,” replied O’Neill. “I’m sorry, sir, I just can’t see.”

Of the two choices available—try to talk him down, or send him to a secluded area to crash where no one else could get hurt—Gerrard and the base personnel never even mentioned the latter choice. “We’re going to get you down safely, Mr. O’Neill. You just have to follow my instructions to the tee.”

Ancient Egyptians shaved their armpits and used citrus-cinnamon deodorant.

THE APPROACH

Once O’Neill aligned his plane with the runway, he was able to begin his descent. In order to land safely, however, a pilot must have visual contact with the ground. O’Neill couldn’t even see his instruments, let alone the ground, so he pulled up at the last second. “No worries,” said Gerrard. “Let’s turn around and we’ll try again.” And they did—six more times. On a couple of the attempts, the plane bounced off the runway; on others O’Neill pulled up early, apologizing each time. Gerrard was patient, though, as both planes had enough fuel to remain up there for a long time. But O’Neill was the wild card: No one knew how much longer he could keep flying. What they did know was that a second stroke near the base and neighboring village could mean disaster, so they had no choice but to keep trying.

Finally, on the seventh attempt, more than 45 minutes after Gerrard took O’Neill’s wing, the Cessna hit the runway hard and bounced back up. O’Neill was able to keep it steady; the plane bounced again on the runway and started veering to the right, then hit ground a third time—and stayed down. O’Neill engaged the brake and the Cessna rolled to a stop in the grass…without a scratch. When paramedics met him at the plane, he was confused and disoriented but otherwise uninjured.

THE REUNION

O’Neill spent several weeks at the hospital and several months recovering. By the following April, his vision started slowly improving. He still couldn’t fly a plane or even drive a car, but a friend flew him—in the very same Cessna—to Linton so he could finally meet (and see) his rescuers. Gerrard was humble about the ordeal: “I was glad to help a fellow aviator in distress, but I was just part of a team. There were 12 people working at the base that day that helped get Jim safely back on the ground.”

“I owe my life to the RAF,” said O’Neill, “as well as the lives of those dozens of people I could have crash-landed on.”

Best man at Adam Sandler’s wedding: his English bulldog, Meatball.

HOW TO TICKLE A TROUT

Here’s an intriguing “art” that dates back to the days when most Americans lived in rural areas: catching trout with your bare hands. (And to learn how to hypnotize a chicken, turn to
page 371
.)

S
TEP 1.
Figure out where the trout are hiding. When trout are startled or need to rest, they seek shelter in areas that offer protection from predators, such as underneath submerged rocks or logs. Or, on stretches of a river or stream bank, the bank may be “undercut”—there may be a recessed area beneath the bank where trout hide. If the water is brimming with trout, the easiest way to find their hiding places may be to simply follow them. Walk along the bank, keeping an eye out for movement. The trout are also keeping an eye out for you, and when they see you, they will head for shelter.

STEP 2.
When you find a spot where the trout may be hiding, approach slowly and carefully to avoid scaring them out of their hiding place. Position yourself so that you can reach down into the water and touch the fish. In the case of an undercut bank, you can lie down on the bank with one arm in the water.

STEP 3.
Slowly and carefully feel around for trout. If you do make contact with one, slowly tickle its underside, just forward of the tail fin, with your forefinger. This will start to calm the fish.

STEP 4.
Slowly tickle your way forward along the underside of the trout. This will calm the fish further, putting it into a trance-like state. When you’ve tickled your way up to the gills, you should be able to grab the trout without much trouble. Toss it on the bank. (If you’re strictly tickle-and-release, throw it back in the water.)

FISHY BUSINESS

Trout tickling is a surprisingly effective technique once you get the hang of it. So effective, in fact, that it’s considered a form of poaching in the U.K. and punishable by a fine equivalent to about $4,000. Why so high? Tickle-poachers fish without equipment, and that makes them difficult to catch. They have to be caught “wet-handed,” while they’re lying at the water’s edge with one hand in the water.

Highest U.S. lake: Pacific Tarn, in the Colorado Rockies (13,420 feet above sea level).

BIRD BRAINS, PART II

In Part I, we told you about some really intelligent birds. But most of them are lame ducks compared to these avian Einsteins. (Part I is on
page 44
.)

C
AWS AND EFFECT
The world’s most intelligent bird: According to ornithologists, it’s the common crow. Surprised? As we noted earlier, eagles and vultures use rocks to break open hard-shelled eggs. Urban crows do kind of the same thing to open hard walnut shells, only they utilize cars. At busy intersections in cities around the world, they’ve been observed standing on the sidewalks alongside pedestrians, waiting for the light to change. When it does, the crows hop to the middle of the street and drop a few walnuts. Then they hop back to safety, wait for the light to turn green, and watch as the cars drive over the nuts, cracking them open. When the light turns red again, the crows hop back into the street and collect their meals.

BY HOOK OR BY ROOK

All members of the corvid family—crows, ravens, rooks, magpies, jackdaws, and jays—are intelligent, but none more so than crows and ravens. Much of what we know about these birds comes from two of the world’s leading corvid researchers, Nathan Emery and Nicky Clayton. Their most famous experiment took place in 2002 when they studied New Caledonian crows, native to the South Pacific. The researchers placed a small canister full of insects inside a slim glass beaker and challenged a crow named Betty to get it out so she could eat the insects: There was a little wire loop on top of the canister, but Betty couldn’t reach it with her beak; next to the beaker was a straight piece of wire. She picked it up and stuck it inside the beaker, but couldn’t lift up the canister. What Betty did next stunned the scientific community: She pressed the piece of wire against the tabletop a few times and bent it into a small hook. Then she used the hook to remove the canister.

Clayton and Emery concluded, “Some corvids are not only superior in intelligence to birds of other avian species, but also rival many nonhuman primates.”

If all the freight trains in the U.S. were lined up, they’d cross the country six times.

WINGING IT

It’s impressive that Betty taught herself how to bend that piece of wire, but it’s not
that
much of a stretch—crows regularly construct tools in the wild. Like chimpanzees, for example, they remove leaves from twigs to scoop up insects. But another sign of intelligence is whether an animal can be taught to do something it
doesn’t
do in the wild. Mammals are good at this. (Think of a bear riding a bicycle.) Rooks, another species of corvid, don’t use tools in the wild. Could they be taught to do so in a lab?

In 2009 Emery and another researcher, Christopher David Bird (really), put one of Aesop’s fables to the test: In “The Crow and the Pitcher,” the crow throws stones into a pitcher until the water level is high enough for him to take a drink. They set up the same scenario for the rooks and demonstrated how it worked. The rooks observed and, according to Emery, “All four subjects solved the problem with an appreciation of precisely how many stones were needed.” Three of the rooks figured out pretty quickly that large rocks work better than small ones. These findings showed that rooks have a “flexible ability” to use tools—they can improvise and learn from their mistakes, both signs of higher intelligence. “Clayton and Emery’s work has opened up ways of looking at the role of learning from experience,” said Uta Frith, a neuroscientist at University College London. “Birds are providing an imperfect but extremely revealing mirror to us. They let us see the behaviors we most treasure as part of being human in a new light.”