Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (72 page)

• The letters to the offices of Senators Daschle and Leahy were postmarked October 9, also in Trenton, New Jersey. Both had handwritten, fictitious return addresses—4th Grade, Greendale School, Franklin Park, NJ 08852—and both contained photocopies of a different message:

09-11-01

YOU CAN NOT STOP US.

WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX.

YOU DIE NOW.

ARE YOU AFRAID?

DEATH TO AMERICA.

DEATH TO ISRAEL.

ALLAH IS GREAT.

• All the letters were later traced to a spore-contaminated sidewalk postal-service mailbox not far from Princeton University.

Totally Tattoos Barbie came with stick-on tattoos, including a lower-back “tramp stamp.”

THE ANTHRAX SPORES

The anthrax samples mailed on the two different dates were of very different quality. The first batch, which went to the media outlets in Florida and New York, was described as a brown “granular” substance, and was relatively weak, being made up of only about 10% anthrax spores—although it was still obviously very dangerous. The substance sent in October to the two senators was described as a fine white powder…and was nearly 100% pure. (Each of those letters contained trillions of spores, theoretically enough to kill millions of people.)

For investigators, one of the most fortunate pieces of the anthrax puzzle was that you can actually identify anthrax spores the same way you can identify people: via DNA. (Bacteria have DNA, too.) There are only 89 known genetic strains of anthrax bacteria in the world, and markers identifying each strain are on record. That meant investigators could test all the spore samples collected and compare them to the known strains. And from early on, investigators knew exactly what they were working with and exactly where it came from. The spores were cultured from what is called the “Ames strain,” which produces a particularly powerful form of the anthrax toxin. There were just 16 government, commercial, and university labs around the country that had Ames-strain bacteria, and further testing narrowed the spores used in the attacks to a particular batch known as RMR-1029.

That batch existed in only one place in the world: the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick in Maryland—the military’s primary biological weapons lab. The 2001 anthrax attacks, it seemed, came not only from inside the United States, it looked like they had been done by someone working for the government.

But even though this was known very early on, it didn’t stop federal investigators—and the media—from looking for blame elsewhere.

For Part IV of the story, turn to
page 489
.

When people in Sweden have their picture taken, they say “omelet,” not “cheese.”

DO YOU SPEAK
LÁADAN?

You’ve heard of Esperanto (page 195) and you can probably speak a little pig Latin. Here’s a look at some other “constructed languages” that have been created over the years. Appy-hay eading-ray!

S
OLRESOL (“Language”):
A “musical language” created by François Sudre, a French author, in the mid-1800s.
Features:
Sudre based his entire language on the musical scale: “do,” “re,” “mi,” “fa,” “sol,” “la,” and “ti.” Each word in Solresol is composed of one or more of these syllables. It’s probably the only language in the world that can be translated directly into music, and vice versa. And not just music: Any system you can think of that has seven different components—seven hand signals, seven whistles, seven colors, etc.—can serve as a medium for communicating in Solresol.

Sample Words:

dodomi:
season

reredo:
July

midofasol:
orphan

fafadosol:
surgeon

ladoti:
book

tiremido
:deaf

dofafado:
Easter

remitisol:
stairs

fadore:
corrupt

sollamifa:
sculpture

laremila
:blue

tilamido:
police

Fatal Flaw:
Sudre drew huge crowds at demonstrations where language students translated his violin playing into speech. But as much as the public enjoyed the show, most thought of Solresol as nothing more than a novelty act. It never caught on.

VOLAPÜK (“World Language”):
Invented by a Bavarian Catholic priest named Johann Martin Schleyer in the 1870s, Volapük was inspired by a dream: God told Schleyer to invent a single, universal language that people of all nations could speak.

Features:
To make Volapük easier to pronounce, Schleyer left the “th” sound out of the language entirely. He also kept the use of the letter “r” to a minimum, to make it easier for native Chinese speakers to pronounce. These and other efforts at simplification paid off: By the late 1880s, there were nearly 300 Volapük societies around the world. More than two dozen magazines were printed in or about Volapük, and textbooks of Volapük language
instruction were available in 25 different languages. Three international Volapük conferences were held, in 1884, 1887, and 1889; the last one, in Paris, was conducted entirely in Volapük.

Unlike humans, whales and dolphins have to actively decide when to breathe.

Sample Words:

nenomik:
abnormal

sanavik:
medical

delagased:
newspaper

släm:
mud

rolatridem:
escalator

niblit:
pants

paänakek:
pancake

jipal:
mother

yebafel
: lawn

sasenan:
murderer

geböfik:
ordinary

adyö!
goodbye!

Fatal Flaw:
Schleyer was very protective of Volapük, and that proved to be its downfall. When a group of reformers tried to fix what they felt were flaws in his language, he blocked them. The movement then split into several factions, each of which then created their own version of Volapük. The entire point of a single universal language having been defeated, the movement collapsed. Today there are fewer than 30 Volapük speakers on Earth.

INTERLINGUA (“Between Language”):
Since English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Russian are all cousins, they have many words with common roots that look and sound similar to one another. Why not use these words as a basis for creating a universal language? That was the thinking behind Interlingua, a language started in 1937 by a group called the International Auxiliary Language Association. The project was delayed by World War II, but by 1951 Interlingua was ready to go.

Features:
Basing Interlingua on existing languages made it a lot easier to learn. You don’t have to be a fluent Interlingua speaker to guess what words like
fragile, politica, rapide,
and even
disvelop-pamento
mean.

Sample Words:

in flammas:
ablaze

ris:
rice

escaldar:
scald

servitor:
waiter

abbreviar:
abridge

salon:
living room

inseniar:
teach

vinia:
vineyard

condemnar:
convict

cisorios:
scissors

legumine:
vegetable

juvene:
young

Outcome:
Interest in Interlingua peaked in the 1950s and 1960s, when more than 30 scientific and medical journals published article summaries in Interlingua. Interest has dropped off considerably
since then, but Interlingua remains the second-most popular constructed language after Esperanto.

Top three oil-producing countries: Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the United States Top three countries with the greatest oil reserves: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Canada.

LÁADAN (“Perception Language”):
The world’s first feminist language. Invented by science-fiction author Suzette Haden Elgin in 1982, Láadan was an experimental language created to test a theory that was popular with feminists: namely, that modern languages had a male bias that restricted feminine thought and perception.

Remember the old saw that Eskimos have a hundred different words for “snow” while English has only “snow”? If having only one word for “snow” limits how English speakers think about snow, the feminist theory went, then a male bias in modern languages, if it existed, would similarly restrict the perceptions of women. Elgin theorized that if women embraced Láadan within 10 years, or were at least inspired by it to create a better feminist language, that would support the theory of a male bias in modern languages. If Láadan flopped, that was evidence of little or no bias: Women had no need for Láadan because they were well served by the languages they already spoke.

Features:
Láadan had five words for “joy,” five words for “anger,” four words for “it” (three female and one male), and six words for “alone.” It also had 13 words for “love,” including
ab,
“love for one liked but not respected”;
ad,
“love for one respected but not liked”; and
éeme,
“love for one neither liked nor respected.” (Curiously, Láadan also has a word for “sewage plant
”—waludal
.)

Sample Words:

with:
adult (female)

lub:
chicken

miwith:
city

oma:
hand

withid:
adult (male)

oba:
body

miwithá:
city dweller

wíi:
alive

héeya:
fear

sheb:
change

yob:
coffee

óol:
moon

Outcome:
Láadan never attracted more than a handful of enthusiasts, some of whom are still contributing new words and grammar to this day. But as Arika Okrent writes in
In the Land of Invented Languages,
“After 10 years passed, and women still had not embraced Láadan or come up with another language to replace it, Elgin declared the experiment a failure, noting, with some bitterness, that Klingon (a hyper-male ‘warrior’ language) was thriving.”

SHOW STOPPERS

The show must go on! Or, well, um, no. It doesn’t, really
.

P
ERFORMER:
John Cale, Welsh singer-songwriter and a founding member of the highly influential rock band the Velvet Underground. He was also quite a strange person.

SHOW:
Cale was performing with his own band at a club called The Greyhound in Croydon, England, in April 1977. During a long and very dark version of the Elvis Presley classic “Heartbreak Hotel,” Cale brought a dead chicken onto the stage (it had been killed backstage a short time earlier) and started swinging it around his head.

STOPPER:
Then he pulled out a meat cleaver and decapitated it—and threw the head and body into the dancing crowd. Everyone immediately stopped dancing. Cale later called it “the most effective showstopper I ever came up with.” But it didn’t stop with the audience: The band’s drummer, Joe Stefko, and bass player, Mike Visceglia, were vegetarians. They’d actually discussed the chicken routine with Cale before the show, and told him that if he did it, they’d leave. He did it…and they left. Not just the stage—they both left the band. (Stefko went on to play with Meat Loaf; Visceglia with Suzanne Vega.) Cale’s next album, titled
Animal Justice,
contained a track that, so the story goes, was about the two quitting bandmembers. Title: “Chickensh*t.”

PERFORMER:
Cate Blanchett, Oscar-winning actress

SHOW:
Blanchett was playing Blanche DuBois in
A Streetcar Named Desire
at the Sydney Theater in Australia in 2009.

STOPPER:
In the middle of a fight scene with Joel Edgerton, playing Stanley Kowalski, Edgerton was supposed to pick up a large, 1960s-style radio and, in a fit of rage, throw it out a window. He missed the window and nailed Blanchett right in the head. The audience gasped as Blanchett dropped to her knees, and blood started dripping down her face and neck. Somehow, the actress managed to get up and continue the scene, but about 30 seconds later the lights went out and the curtain came down. After 10 more minutes went by, a producer came out and
announced that the show was canceled. (Fortunately, Blanchett was only slightly injured and returned to the show the next evening.)

James Earl Jones, Ray Liotta, and Susan Sarandon all got their start on soap operas.

PERFORMER:
Cat Power, a singer/songwriter whose real name is Chan Marshall

SHOW:
In November 2000, just as she was beginning to gain national attention, Power did a show at Irving Plaza, a music hall in New York City. She was also becoming known for her bizarre onstage antics. That night she started—but didn’t finish—several songs on both the guitar and the piano, mumbled apologies to the crowd,
asked
them to talk during her songs, and constantly interrupted songs to make requests or complaints to the soundman.

STOPPER:
An hour or so into the show, Power jumped off the stage and ran through the crowd and out the front door. She wasn’t seen again that night. Power later blamed the antics on a drinking problem. She’s now sober and not nearly as erratic onstage as she used to be. But before that, she once mooned an audience, told them all to go away, and said that if they didn’t like it they could sue her. Another time, at an outdoor show, she ignored the crowd altogether for 15 minutes…while she talked to a squirrel.