Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader (93 page)

ABOUT YOUR BODY

Q:
How heavy are our bones?

A:
Our bones are a remarkable combination of strength and lightness. “In a 160-lb. man, only about 29 pounds—less than 20 percent—represent bone weight. Steel bars of comparable size would weigh at least four or five times as much.” (From
Can Elephants Swim?
compiled by Robert M. Jones)

The end of the Cold War? Forty-eight U.S. spy rings were uncovered during the 1980s

BURNING QUESTION

Q:
What are first-, second-, and third-degree bums?

A:
“Burns are always serious because of the danger of infection while the damaged tissues are healing. In a first-degree burn, no skin is broken, but it is red and painful. In a second-degree burn, the burned area develops blisters and is very painful. One must try to avoid opening the blisters. In a third-degree burn, both the outer layer of the skin and the lower layer of flesh have been burned. This is the most serious of the three types, as the possibility of infection is greatest.” (From
How Does a Fly Walk Upside Down
, by Martin M. Goldwyn)

BUSY THOUGHTS

Q:
Why doesn’t a busy signal stop as soon as the person you’re calling gets off the phone?

A:
“There’s both a technical and a business reason that you can’t just stay on the line and wait for the busy signal to stop. The technical reason is that the sound isn’t coming from your friend over there on the other side of town, it’s coming from the central switching office of the phone company. (The tone is generated by a gadget sensibly called the tone generator.) That said, the main reason you can’t stick on the line is that the phone company doesn’t want you to. You’re tying up a line. So get off the phone.” (From
Why Things Are, Volume II
, by Joel Aschenbach)

COLD FLASHES

Q:
Why do people get headaches when they eat ice cream too fast?

A:
“No one is quite sure what causes an ice cream headache (the official name for it). One likely guess is that it happens when ice cream (or other cold stuff) causes the blood vessels on the roof of your mouth to contract (i.e., shrink) a bit. Since the blood can’t flow through these vessels as quickly as before, it backs up into the head, causing the other blood vessels to stretch. The result: pain.” (From
Know It All
, by Ed Zotti)

BUT DON’T DRINK IT

Q:
Which contains more lemon, Lemon Pledge or Country Time Lemonade?

A:
According to
The Hidden Life of Groceries
, Lemon Pledge does.

Q: Where are the world’s largest sculptures? A: Mt. Rushmore.

More TV wisdom from
Primetime Proverbs: The Book of TV Quotes
by Jack Mingo and John Javna.

ON DOCTORS

Sophia:
“How come so many doctors are Jewish?”

Jewish Doctor:
“Because their mothers are.”

—
The Golden Girls

ON EATING

“When a person eats fluffy eats, little cakes, pastry, and fancy little things, then that person is also fluffy. But when you eat meats and strong, heavy food, then you are also a strong person.”

—Dr. Kurt von Stuffer (Sid Caesar),
Your Show of Shows

“The way prices are going up, pretty soon indigestion is going to be a luxury.”

—Larry,
Newhart

ON EXPERIENCE

“I’m an experienced woman; I’ve been around....Well, all right, I might not’ve been around, but I’ve been... nearby.”

—Mary Richards,
The Mary Tyler Moore Show

ON FAMILY

“Her origins are so low, you’d have to limbo under her family tree.”

—Minister (Eugene Levy),
SCTV

ON FASHION

“There’s something neat about a sweater with a hole. It makes you look like a tough guy.”

—Beaver Cleaver,
Leave It to Beaver

“If women dressed for men, the stores wouldn’t sell much—just an occasional sun visor.”

—Groucho Marx,
You Bet Your Life

ON BEING FAT

“I love my blubber. It keeps me warm, it keeps me company, it keeps my pants up.”

—Oscar Madison,
The Odd Couple

Peter Marshall (the emcee):

“Jackie Gleason recently revealed that he firmly believes in them and has actually seen them on at least two occasions. What are they?”

Charlie Weaver:
“His feet.”

—
Hollywood Squares

Tired fact: During the work week, only 41% of Americans get 7 or more nightly hours of sleep.

Do you believe everything you read or see in the news? Here’s a story that might shake you up. From
It’s a Conspiracy!,
by The National Insecurity Council.

W
ho could forget the pretty young Kuwaiti refugee with tears running down her cheeks? While America was deciding whether to go to war against Iraq, on October 10, 1990, little “Nayirah” testified before a televised congressional hearing. Quietly sobbing at times, the teenager told how she had watched Iraqi troops storm a Kuwait City hospital, snatch 15 infants from their incubators, and leave “the babies to die on the cold floor.” Americans were appalled. People across the country joined President Bush in citing the story as a good reason why America should go to war.

THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER

• As it turns out, Nayirah’s story was a lie. Doctors at the Al-Adan Hospital in Kuwait City, where the incident allegedly took place, said it never happened.

• Congressional representatives conducting the hearing took pains to explain that Nayirah’s last name was withheld “to protect her family from reprisals in occupied Kuwait.” Also untrue. In fact, the young woman was not a refugee at all: she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, and she likely wasn’t in Kuwait at all when the atrocities supposedly happened.

• Actually, Nayirah had been coached by Hill and Knowlton, an American public relations firm headed by President Bush’s former chief of staff, Craig Fuller. Hill and Knowlton selected her wardrobe, wrote her a script to memorize, and rehearsed with her for hours in front of video cameras.

DISINFORMING THE WORLD

• “Nayirah” was just one of many media stunts that sold the war to the American people, according to “Nightline” reporter Morgan Strong in an article he wrote for
TV Guide
in 1992.

A dragonfly, the fastest flying insect, can move up to 35 m.p.h.

• A second Kuwaiti woman testified before a widely televised session of the UN while the world body was deciding whether to sanction force against Iraq. She was identified as simply another refugee. But it turns out that she was the wife of Kuwait’s minister of planning and was herself a well-known TV personality in Kuwait.

• Strong asked a Kuwaiti exile leader why such a high-profile person was passed off as just another refugee. “Because of her professional experience,” the Kuwaiti replied, “she is more believable.” In her testimony, she indicated that her experience was firsthand. “Such stories...I personally have experienced,” she said. But when interviewed later, in Saudi Arabia, she admitted that she had no direct knowledge of the events.

HILL AND KNOWLTON AT WORK

• Hill and Knowlton personnel were allowed to travel unescorted through Saudi Arabia at a time when news reporters were severely restricted by the U.S. Army. The PR firm’s employees interviewed Kuwaiti refugees, looking for lurid stories and amateur videos that fit their political agenda. Kuwaitis with the most compelling tales were coached and made available to a press hamstrung by military restrictions. Happy for any stories to file, reporters rarely questioned the stories of Iraqi brutality that the refugees told them.

• Hill and Knowlton also supplied networks with videotapes that distorted the truth. One Hill and Knowlton tape purported to show Iraqis firing on peaceful Kuwaiti demonstrators...and that’s the way the news media dutifully reported it. But the incident on tape was actually Iraqi soldiers
firing back
at Kuwaiti resistance fighters.

THE TRUTH

• Strong says: “These examples are but a few of the incidents of outright misinformation that found their way onto network news. It is an inescapable fact that much of what Americans saw on their news broadcasts, especially leading up to the Allied offensive against Iraqi-occupied Kuwait, was in large measure the contrivance of a public relations firm.”

The double coconut palm produces the largest seeds (up to 60 lbs.) in the plant kingdom.

It’s as famous as UFOs, as fascinating as the Abominable Snowman, as mysterious as the lost city of Atlantis. But is it real?

B
ACKGROUND

The next time you’re looking at a map of the world, trace your finger from Key West, Florida, to Puerto Rico; from Puerto Rico to the island of Bermuda; and from there back to Florida. The 140,000-square-mile patch of ocean you’ve just outlined is the Bermuda Triangle. In the past 50 years, more than 100 ships and planes have disappeared there. That may sound like a lot, but it’s actually about standard for a busy stretch of ocean.

“Besides,” says Larry Kuche, author of
The Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved
, “hundreds of planes and ships pass safely through the so-called triangle every day....It is no more logical to try to find a common cause for all the disappearances in the triangle than to try to find one cause for all the automobile accidents in Arizona.”

Experts agree that the only real mystery about the Bermuda Triangle is why everyone thinks it’s so mysterious.

THE DISAPPEARANCE THAT STARTED IT ALL

The “Lost Squadron.”
On December 15, 1945, Flight 19, a group of five U.S. Navy Avenger planes carrying 14 men, took off from the Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station at 2 p.m. for a three-hour training mission off the Florida coast. Everything went well until about 3:40 p.m., when Lt. Charles C. Taylor, the leader of Flight 19, radioed back to Fort Lauderdale that both of his compasses had malfunctioned and that he was lost. “I am over land, but it’s broken,” he reported to base. “I am sure I’m in the Keys, but I don’t know how far down and I don’t know how to get to Fort Lauderdale.” Shortly afterward he broke in with an eerier transmission: “We cannot see land....We can’t be sure of any direction—even the ocean doesn’t look as it should.”

Over the next few hours, the tower heard numerous static-filled transmissions between the five planes. The last transmission came at 6:00 p.m., when a Coast Guard plane heard Taylor radio his colleagues: “All planes close up tight...will have to ditch unless land-fall. When the first plane drops to 10 gallons we all go down together.” That was his last transmission—that evening all five planes disappeared without a trace.

Half of all Americans who visit psychiatrists are between the ages of 25 and 44.

A few hours later, a search plane with a crew of 13 took off for the last reported position of the flight...and was never seen again. No wreckage or oil slick from any of the planes was ever found, prompting the Naval Board of Inquiry to observe that the planes “had disappeared as if they had flown to Mars.”

A MYTH IS BORN

The Lost Squadron would probably be forgotten today if it hadn’t been for a single news story published on September 16, 1950. An Associated Press reporter named E. V. W. Jones decided to occupy his time on a slow day by writing a story about the Lost Squadron and other ships and planes that had disappeared into the Atlantic Ocean off the Florida coast.

Dozens of newspapers around the country picked it up...and for some reason, it captured people’s imaginations. Over the next few years the story was reprinted in tabloids, pulp magazines, pseudoscience journals, and “unexplained mysteries” books.

IT GETS A NAME

In 1964, Vincent Gaddis, another journalist, gave the story its
name
. He wrote an article in
Argosy
magazine called “The Deadly Bermuda Triangle” and listed dozens of ships that had disappeared there over the centuries, starting with the
Rosalie
(which disappeared in 1840) and ending with the yacht
Conne-mara IV
(which vanished in 1956). He also offered an explanation for the disappearances, speculating that they were caused by “space-time continua [that] may exist around us on the earth, inter-penetrating our known world,” a pseudo-scientific way of suggesting that the planes and ships had disappeared into a third dimension.

Interest in the Bermuda Triangle hit a high point in 1974, when Charles Berlitz (grandson of the founder of Berlitz language schools) authored
The Bermuda Triangle: An Incredible Saga of Unexplained Disappearances
. Without presenting a shred of real evidence, he suggested the disappearances were caused by electromagnetic impulses generated by a 400-foot-tall pyramid at the bottom of the ocean. The book shot to the top of the bestseller list, inspiring scores of copycat books, TV specials, and movies that kept the Bermuda Triangle myth alive for another generation.

Q: What do Cleopatra and John Wilkes Booth have in common?

DEBUNKING THE MYTH

Is there anything to the Bermuda Triangle theory? The U.S. government doesn’t think so—the Coast Guard doesn’t even bother to keep complete statistics on the incidents there and attributes the disappearances to the strong currents and violent weather patterns.

In 1985 an air-traffic controller named John Myhre came up with a plausible theory about the Lost Squadron’s strange fate. A few years earlier he had been flipping through a book on the subject, when he came across a more complete record of the last radio communications between the five planes. Myhre was a pilot and had logged many hours flying off the coast of Florida. “When I ran across a more accurate version of Taylor’s last transmissions,” Myhre recounts, “I realized what had happened....The lead plane radioed that he was lost over the Florida Keys. Then he said he was over a single island and there was no land visible in any direction.” Myhre believes the island Lt. Taylor reported “had to be Walker’s Cay,” an island that is not part of the Florida Keys: