Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (64 page)

KNOW YOUR LANDS

Archipelago:
a chain of islands grouped or clustered close to each other.

Isthmus:
a narrow stretch of land that connects two large landmasses, and with water on either side. The Isthmus of Panama, for example, connects North America to South America and is bordered by the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea.
Atoll:
an island in an ocean or sea that was formed out of a ring of coral.

Mesa:
generally occurring in dry areas (like a desert), it’s a raised area of flat land atop steep walls. If it’s a vast, miles-spanning area, it’s a
plateau.
If it has a pointed top or summit instead of a flat top, it’s a
butte.

Cape:
a piece of land that juts out into a water body.

Arrrgh! More than 70% of the world’s pirated goods come from China.

COMPLAINTS DEPT.

Just a page of people whining about this and that
.

“Insincere people compliment you, but they don’t mean it. The worst was Ray Charles. He said he liked my dress.”

—Joan Rivers

“The Pope is single, too. You don’t hear people saying
he
has commitment problems.”

—Garry Shandling

“You want me to
be
great, but you don’t ever want me to
say
I’m great.”

—Kanye West

“Girls scream for Edward, not Robert. I still can’t get a date.”

—Robert Pattinson, who played Edward in
Twilight

“I can’t stand when people say, ‘Don’t hate me because I'm beautiful.’ OK, how about I hate you because you said that?”

—Tia Carrere

“Sometimes I’m so sweet even I can’t stand it.”

—Julie Andrews

“Moses dragged us through the desert to the one place in the Middle East where there’s no oil.”

—Golda Meir

“Abstract art? A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.”

—Al Capp

“There’s no such thing as soy milk. It’s soy juice.”

—Lewis Black

“Just standing around looking beautiful is so boring, really boring, so boring.”

—Michelle Pfeiffer

“You know why the French hate us? Thay gave us the croissant. And you know what we did with it? We turned it into a croissandwich.”

—Denis Leary

“It is clearly stated in Article 5 of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights that ‘No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment.’”

—Lindsay Lohan, on being sentenced to 90 days in jail

“The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.”

—Randall Jarrell

The photographic effect called “red-eye” is most visible in people with blue eyes.

THE WORST MOVIE
OF ALL TIME?

If you’re a fan of cheesy films like
Manos: The Hands of Fate, Plan 9 from Outer Space,
and
Troll 2,
you’ll love this one. Uncle John saw it last year when our local Bad Film Society screened it, and as he was watching, it occurred to him that it actually gave new meaning to the word “bad.” (But somehow he couldn’t stop talking about how great it was.)

T
HE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN
In June 2003, a film called
The Room
premiered in a handful of Los Angeles theaters. It’s the story of a love triangle between Johnny, a banker; Lisa, his girlfriend; and Johnny’s best friend Mark. The film was the brainchild of Tommy Wiseau, the actor who plays Johnny. Wiseau also wrote, directed, produced, and distributed the film. He financed
The Room,
too, shelling out $6 million of his own money to make it, plus thousands more on print and TV ads and a single giant billboard overlooking busy Highland Avenue in Los Angeles.

The Room
was Wiseau’s first feature film. He hoped to use it to launch a Hollywood career…but all he succeeded in doing was blowing $6 million in record time.
The Room
played to nearly empty theaters for just two weeks before it was yanked from the screen; in that time it grossed only $1,900, not enough to cover even one month’s rent on the Highland Avenue billboard. Put another way, for every million Wiseau spent,
The Room
earned less than $320, making it one of the worst box-office flops in history.

CITIZEN PAIN

Is there anything about
The Room
that isn’t bad? The acting is stunningly incompetent—none of the actors had ever had a major film role before, and Wiseau was incapable of providing decent direction. And the love scene between Johnny and Lisa is
creepy
(picture a Troll doll having its way with a seat cushion, except that Lisa is the cushion). Wiseau recycles the footage in a
second
love scene 20 minutes after the first, so you get to watch it twice.

As a screenwriter, Wiseau was even worse. New characters
appear out of nowhere and aren’t properly identified, so it’s never clear who they are. A number of subplots—such as drug abuse, unrequited love, and bad real estate deals—are introduced, then quickly abandoned. (“I got the results of the test back. I definitely have breast cancer,” Lisa’s mother tells her, and the subject never comes up again.) And though the thickly-accented Wiseau refuses to this day to say where he comes from, English is clearly not his first language.
The Room
is full of clunky, confusing, and unintentionally funny dialog: When a (never-identified) character catches Lisa and Mark kissing at Johnny’s birthday party and confronts them, Mark yells, “Leave your stupid comments in your pocket!”

Odds of a Civil War soldier dying in the war: 1 in 6.

PATRON ZERO

The movie likely would have died a quick and unmourned death had an aspiring young screenwriter named Michael Rousselet not happened to see the film near the end of its two-week theatrical run. As Rousselet sat alone in the empty theater, he was stunned by what he saw—bad lighting, out-of-focus scenes, dubbed dialog out of sync with the lip movements onscreen, poorly designed sets (it’s never clear which room is
the
room, or why the room is so important), one wooden, sophomoric acting performance after another, and much, much more. Whenever Rousselet thought
The Room
had given all that it had to give, it would cough up some wonderful new chunk of mediocrity and incompetence for him to savor. It was unlike any film he’d ever seen. Sure that such a flop would never make it onto DVD, Rousselet sat in the empty theater (while the movie was still running) and called everyone he could think of on his cell phone, telling them they
had
to see
The Room
for themselves before it vanished forever.

MISERY LOVES COMPANY

That theater didn’t stay empty for long. Though
The Room
died at every other venue where it was shown, Rousselet’s promotional work paid off at this one. A small crowd of friends joined him at the next showing, and as these people phoned
their
friends, the numbers grew steadily at each remaining screening. “We saw it four times in three days, and on the last day I had over 100 people there,” he told
Entertainment Weekly
in 2008.

By the time
The Room
ended its theatrical run, a small but
dedicated fan base had already begun e-mailing Wiseau to thank him for his efforts and ask him to screen the film again. Wiseau received dozens more e-mails in the months that followed, and in June 2004 he booked a small theater in West Hollywood for a single midnight screening. That event was a hit—so many people turned out to see the film that Wiseau booked another midnight showing a month later, then another, and then another.

The Romans had heated swimming pools as far back as 1 B.C.

As the crowds continued to grow like lookie-loos at a traffic accident, he expanded to two screens at the multiplex, then three, then four, and then five. Strong word of mouth among a steadily growing fan base of “Roomies,” as they call themselves, led Wiseau to schedule screenings in cities up and down the West Coast, then in other parts of United States and Canada, and eventually in Great Britain. And with foreign-language editions reportedly in the works,
The Room
may soon have fans all over the world.

SPOONING

Have you ever been to a showing of the 1975 film
The Rocky Horror Picture Show?
As was the case with that cult film,
The Room
’s fans have created audience participation rituals all their own. Roomies attend screenings dressed as their favorite characters, shout out their favorite bad lines at the appropriate moments, yell “FOCUS!” during blurry scenes, march out “in protest” during the troll doll/seat cushion love scenes, and throw plastic spoons whenever the spoon photograph in Johnny’s apartment appears. There’s no question that the Roomies are there to laugh at Wiseau and his masterpiece, but he says he doesn’t mind. “As long as they laugh or enjoy themselves, I enjoy with them,” he says.

NO ROOM AT
THE ROOM

If you’re ever in L.A. on the last Saturday of the month, go see
The Room
. Buy your tickets early—even when the film is being shown on five screens,
The Room
sells out quickly, especially when Wiseau or other stars appear in person. Wisseau’s fabulous flop has been reborn as the hottest cult film phenomenon in decades, and at an estimated gross of more than $1,000 per screening,
The Room
is on track to break even sometime in the year 2504, maybe sooner if you consider the profits from
The Room
T-shirts, CDs, DVDs, movie posters, and talking Johnny bobblehead dolls.

Bun fact: McDonald’s uses 2,500 tons of sesame seeds per year.

MODERN WORDS…
NOT!

Here are a few terms that you might think were recent additions to English, but have actually been in the language for quite some time
.

P
OLITICALLY CORRECT:
Dates back to a 1793 U.S. Supreme Court decision in
Chisholm v. Georgia
. Justice James Wilson wrote that the people, not the states, held the real power in the country: “To ‘The United States’ instead of to the ‘People of the United States’ is the toast given. This is not politically correct.”

SMASH HIT:
The entertainment trade magazine
Variety
began using this accolade to describe a successful movie in the 1920s.

SPORK:
The term for a spoon/fork has been around since at least 1909, when it appeared as an entry in the
Century Dictionary
. The utensil itself has been in use since the mid-1800s.

BUNK:
This word for “empty talk” or “nonsense” originated in 1820 when Congressman Felix Walker, who was from Buncombe, North Carolina, talked at length about whether Missouri should be admitted to the Union as a free state or a slave state. Politicians subsequently adopted the phrase “talking from Buncombe.” That was shortened to “bunkum” and finally to “bunk” by humorist George Ade, who wrote in his 1900 book
More Fables,
“History is more or less bunk.”

TRUTHINESS:
Popularized by satirist Stephen Colbert in 2005, it’s been listed in the
Oxford English Dictionary
since 1824 as an alternate form of “truthfulness.” When told that it was already a word, Colbert retorted, “You don’t look up ‘truthiness’ in a book, you look it up in your gut!”

NOT!:
Loudly proclaiming “Not!” at the end of an assertion to negate that assertion was popularized in the late 1980s in
Saturday Night Live’s
“Wayne’s World” sketches, but the joke first gained popularity in the early 1900s by, among others, humorist Ellis Parker Butler, who wrote in
Pig is Pigs
(1905), “Cert’nly, me dear friend Flannery. Delighted!
Not!
”

Today 15% of U.S. workers belong to unions, down from over 40% in the 1950s.

THE LOST EXPLORERS:
LUDWIG LEICHHARDT

The third installment in Uncle John’s look at explorers who should have known better than to “boldly go where no one has gone before
.”

C
RAZY LUDWIG
The Australian Outback is one of the harshest environments on Earth—a sun-blasted wasteland stretching thousands of miles across the continent. That made it one of the great exploration challenges of the 19th century, and the lure of being the first white man to cross the Outback drew adventurers from around the globe. Among them was a quirky German scientist named Ludwig Leichhardt. He came to Australia in 1842 to study the peculiar animals and rock formations of this strange new world, but quickly shifted his focus to exploring the uncharted interior. Leichhardt’s first expedition barely got off the ground—the arrogant, socially awkward Prussian had difficulty finding backers and he spoke little English. Furthermore, he knew nothing about the bush or how to plan an expedition, and didn’t care to learn. He just went.

LUCKY LUDWIG

If some people are just born lucky, Ludwig Leichhardt was one of them. On his first expedition, in 1842, the 29-year-old explorer made his way along 1,500 miles of desert following the northeast coast, filled in some blank spaces on the map, wrote a book about it, and became an overnight sensation. London’s Royal Geographical Society even awarded him a medal. Suddenly the doors to wealthy patrons (and their checkbooks) flew open. Success fueled his ambition, and Leichhardt set his sights on becoming the first European to cross the continent. Many had tried; none had succeeded—yet. On Leichhardt’s first attempt, in 1846, he set out with a small contingent from Brisbane, on the continent’s east-central coast, for Perth, on the west—a distance of about 2,800 miles. They’d traveled about 500 miles before torrential rain,
hunger, and malaria sent them limping back to Brisbane. In March 1848, Leichhardt assembled a new team—this time of five European men, two Aboriginal guides, seven horses, 20 mules, and fifty bulls—and again headed west into the interior. He never made it.