Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (87 page)

India has a larger population than the entire continent of Africa—but is only a tenth the size.

John Wayne was one of the most popular film stars in Hollywood, but he was an outspoken opponent of communism—an anticommunist cowboy who publicly and vehemently opposed everything that Stalin stood for. He was someone Stalin could not control—a “black hat,” or villain, perhaps, in the crazy Western movie that was playing in Stalin’s failing, paranoid mind. And what does a sheriff do when a villain arrives in town? It’s conceivable that U.S.(S.R.) Marshal Joe Stalin could have decided, as the Western cliché goes, that “this town ain’t big enough for the both of us” and ordered John Wayne killed.

STAR TREATMENT

The pieces might seem to fit…until you learn more about Michael Munn, who turns out to be the weakest link in his own chain. Had Munn stopped with the Wayne biography in 2003, he might have retained the credibility he had when the book was first published. But he didn’t stop: In 2008 he wrote a biography of actor Richard Burton, and it, too, is filled with claims that are hard to believe and harder to prove. Munn writes, for example, that Burton had affairs with Lana Turner and Marilyn Monroe (he’d never been linked to them before) and was once caught in a brothel with actor Errol Flynn. (“Sensationalist nonsense,” a Burton family member told the South Wales
Evening Post
. “We’ve read his diaries and he never mentions Errol Flynn. I don’t think they met.”)

Then in 2009, Munn published a biography of British actor David Niven. In it, Munn claims he was at the dying Niven’s bedside in 1982 when Niven confessed to attempting suicide after his first wife died in a freak accident. Munn says Niven also confessed to having affairs with Grace Kelly and Princess Margaret, the sister of Queen Elizabeth II. As if that were not enough, he says Niven also claimed that his second wife contracted a venereal disease after sleeping with John F. Kennedy.

HERE COME THE SONS

Niven’s sons had never heard any of these stories before, and they’d never heard of Munn, either, even though Munn billed himself as an intimate family friend. Even more puzzling: Niven’s
sons couldn’t figure out how Niven would have even been able to tell Munn any of these stories. Niven died from Lou Gehrig’s disease, which by 1982 had robbed him of the ability to
speak
—and that would have made such “confessions” very difficult. (Munn says he taped his conversations with Niven. So why doesn’t he just produce the tapes and put the controversy to rest once and for all? Because, he says, the tapes got “chewed up” by his tape recorder and he threw them all away.)

Who wrote the lead article for
Readers’ Digest
issue #1 in 1922? Alexander Graham Bell.

So why would Munn wait until 2009 to publish things that Niven supposedly told him 25 years earlier? Niven’s son, David Jr., has a theory that could apply to all three of Munn’s biographies: “Everyone featured in these stories is rather conveniently dead, so we can’t ask them to verify them,” he says.

PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN SONGS

• William Henry Harrison (1840): “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” Harrison was a hero in the Battle of Tippecanoe during the War of 1812; his running mate was John Tyler.

• Abraham Lincoln (1864): “Battle Cry of Freedom,” a Union rallying song written during the Civil War by George F. Root. More than 700,000 copies of the song’s sheet music were sold, making it one of the bestsellers of the 19th century.

• Franklin D. Roosevelt (1932): “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Originally written for the movie
Chasing Rainbows,
the song came to be known as the unofficial Democratic Party theme song.

• John F. Kennedy (1960): “High Hopes,” written by Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn a year earlier for the film
A Hole in the Head
. (It won an Oscar.) Cahn wrote new lyrics for JFK’s campaign.

• Lyndon Johnson (1964): “Hello, Lyndon,” a parody of “Hello, Dolly.”

• Jimmy Carter (1976): “Ode to the Georgia Farmer,” by K.E. and Julia Marsh, written to sound like a Civil War ballad.

• George W. Bush (2000): “We the People,” performed by Billy Ray Cyrus.

• John McCain (2008): “Raisin’ McCain,” performed by John Rich of the country music duo Big & Rich.

Humphrey Bogart and Princess Diana were distant relatives.

VIOLET PRECIPITATION

In the puzzle below, we’ve substituted synonyms into the titles of popular books, movies, TV shows, landmarks, etc. See if you can identify the items we’re talking about. (Answers on
page 538
.)

1
.
Joined Commonwealths of the Western Hemisphere (country)

2
.
Birthed to Travel
(album title)

3
.
Jesus-believing Bundle (actor)

4
.
A Wind-Up Citrus Fruit
(novel and movie)

5
.
Bestride, Increasing the Frequency With Which You Hurry (American landmark)

6
.
Woman and the Vagrant
(animated movie)

7
.
Violet Precipitation
(album title and movie)

8
.
Check Turnstile (software company founder)

9
.
Angry Males
(TV drama)

10
.
The Enormous Barricade of the Orient (landmark)

11
.
Circuit of Gaul (sporting event)

12
.
English Crude Oil (company)

13
.
The Big Cat, the Sorceress, and the Bureau
(book and movie)

14
.
The Shadowed Section of Earth’s Satellite
(album title)

15
.
“Praise the lord, it’s the last day of the work week!” (common phrase)

16
.
Insignificant Quest (board game)

17
.
Officer Engines (corporation)

18
.
Determination and Elegance
(TV sitcom)

19
.
The Nobleman of the Jewelry
(book and film series)

20
.
Global Drinking Container (sporting event)

21
.
Banishment on Central Ave
. (album title)

22
.
The Book of Maps Gesticulated
(novel)

23
.
Dad’s Brother Toilet (important person)

In 2007 AT&T censored a live Pearl Jam webcast when the band criticized George W. Bush.

UNCLE JOHN’S ANTS

One day Mrs. Uncle John said, “How come there isn’t ever anything about
aunts
in Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader? and Uncle John answered, “Hey! An article about ants! That’s a great idea!
”

T
HE ANT-CESTOR

One day around 150 million years ago, a small wasp went through an evolutionary change—and poof! it became the very first ant on Earth. Okay, it wasn’t quite like that, but evolutionary biologists claim that all evidence shows ants evolved from a primitive species of wasp between 130 and 160 million years ago. It happened just once, they say, in just one location, and all ants alive today are descended from those very first ants.

Wasps are indeed the creatures genetically most closely related to ants today. Ants, along with bees—which also evolved from wasps—are the only members of a suborder of insects known as
Apocrita
.

HIGH HOPES

Fossil records reveal that ants weren’t very numerous for the first several million years of their existence. It wasn’t until the explosion of the
angiosperms
—the flowering trees and plants—around 100 million years ago, and the subsequent creation of friendly new habitats (like leafy forest floors), that ants began to diversify into hundreds, then thousands, of species. Today there are more than 14,000 known species spread around the planet so thoroughly that there are only a few places
without
native ant populations—Antarctica, Greenland, Iceland, and some remote islands in the Pacific Ocean.

Ants range from just
of an inch to more than an inch in length. They can live in an enormous variety of habitats—underground, inside fallen trees, and even in treetops where they never touch the ground. They’re able to communicate a huge amount of information to each other through a combination of touch and
chemoreception
—the use of pheromones to send and detect messages. And they live in highly organized, very complex societies. They are without question among the most successful animals in
the history of life on Earth and, according to
myrmecologists
(scientists who study ants), they number in the quadrillions. That’s millions of millions of ants. So many that, combined, they not only outnumber, they actually
outweigh
all six billion humans on Earth.

“Choose to be optimistic. It feels better.” —the Dalai Lama

ANT-I-MATTER

With so many different kinds of ants out there, just what is it that distinguishes them from insects? First, the basics: Ants are insects and, like all insects, they have three body parts (head, thorax, and abdomen), three sets of jointed legs, a pair of antennae on their heads, and a hard exoskeleton (as opposed to the internal skeleton that humans have) that supports and protects their bodies. They are also
holometabolous
insects, meaning they go through four distinct life stages: egg, larva, pupa, and adult.

A trait ants share with only their closest relatives, wasps and bees, is the
petiole,
that narrow “waist” between the thorax and abdomen, which allows them to bend their bodies and navigate through their twisty nest tunnels. Also, like wasps and bees, females of many ant species can release a potent cocktail of poisons through a stinger on the end of their abdomen. Why only females? Because the stinger is actually an evolved version of an
ovipositor,
an organ used to lay eggs, found in many insect species.

One characteristic that is unique to ants:
metapleural glands
. These two tiny glands, one on either side of the thorax, produce and secrete an antibiotic concoction that protects ants and their nests from fungus, bacteria, and other infestations—a huge plus in the warm, moist world of ant nests. No other animal is known to have metapleural glands, which, experts say, may play a large part in their overwhelming success.

ANT CASTES

Myrmecologists divide ant society into three major
castes:
queens, males, and workers.

Queens:
The fertile egg-producing members of ant society, they are born with two sets of lacy wings, mate once, lose their wings, and spend the rest of their lives inside their nests, doing little else but laying eggs. An ant colony can have one queen or several; some have hundreds.