Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader (95 page)

THE NAME GAME

When the first jeeps rolled off the assembly lines in 1941, they were known as “GPs,” short for “general purpose.” But they came to be known by other nicknames, including beetle bug, blitz buggy, Leaping Lena, beep, peep, and puddle jumper. Jeep was the one that stuck, not only because of the vehicle’s initials but because of the 1930s
Popeye
cartoon character Jeep, who was “neither fowl nor beast, but knew all the answers and could do most anything.”

The new vehicle was a hit, because
it
could do almost anything, too. As
Smithsonian
magazine put it, “Mounted with a machine gun, it became not just a means of transport, but a combat vehicle....They plowed snow and delivered mail to foxholes at the front. Their engines powered searchlights, their wheels agitated washtubs....With a special waterproofing kit, jeeps crawled through water up to their hoods....The army ordered an amphibious jeep (the seep) and a lightweight jeep for air drops (the fleep).”

COMING HOME

The jeep was so popular that when the war ended Willys-Overland trademarked the jeep as a Jeep (after a lengthy court battle with Ford) and began manufacturing models for the domestic market. But in the 1940s and 1950s, the public wanted big, luxurious cars. Jeep sales stayed sluggish until the 1970s. Then, for some reason, they began to pick up...and have kept getting stronger. In fact, in the 1980s, Chrysler bought American Motors just to get the Jeep line.

In the 1993-1994 model year, Americans bought over 1.4 million jeep-type vehicles—more than twice as many as were built during all of World War II.

Emergency call: In the U.S. you dial 911; in Stockholm, Sweden, you dial 90000.

And you thought the U.S. legal system was strange...

Paris law forbids spinning tops on sidewalks...and staring at the mayor.

19th-century Scottish law required brides to be pregnant on their wedding day.

In England it’s against the law to sue the queen—or to name your daughter “Princess” without her permission.

The law in Teruel, Spain, forbids taking hot baths on Sunday. (Cold baths are OK.)

In Rio de Janeiro, it’s illegal to dance the samba in a tunnel.

Gun control: In Switzerland, the law
requires
you to keep guns and ammunition in your home.

Swedish law prohibits trained seals from balancing balls on their noses.

If you’re arrested for drunken driving in Malaysia, you go to jail. (So does your wife.)

In Australia it’s illegal to hire a woman under the age of 45 to work as a chorus girl.

In Reykjavik, Iceland, it’s illegal to keep a dog as a pet.

If you curse within earshot of a woman in Egypt, the law says you forfeit two days’ pay.

In pre-Islamic Turkey, if a wife let the family coffee pot run dry, her husband was free to divorce her.

The opposite was true in Saudi Arabia, where a woman was free to divorce her husband if he didn’t keep her supplied with coffee.

Horses in Mukden, China, are required to wear diapers; their owners are required “to empty them at regular intervals into specially constructed receptacles.”

Toronto, Canada, law requires pedestrians to give hand signals before turning.

English law forbids marrying your mother-in-law.

Red cars are outlawed in Shanghai, China...and other automobile colors are assigned according to the owner’s profession.

Tchaikovsky reportedly committed suicide by drinking cholera-contaminated water.

You already know these words. But did you know where they come from?

G
ossip:
From
godsib
, which meant “godparent.” (
Sibling
has the same root.) According to Morton S. Freeman in
The Story Behind the Word
, “The idea of gossip grew out of the regular meetings and intimate conversations of the
godsibbes
. What they talked about came to be called
godsibbes
or (as slurred)
gossip.
”

Ignoramus:
The Latin word which means “we do not know.” By the 17th century the term referred almost exclusively to “ignorant, arrogant attorneys,” thanks in large part to a 1615 play in which the main character was a stupid lawyer named Ignoramus.

Minimum:
Comes from the Latin word
minium
, “red lead.” “In medieval times,” the book
Word Mysteries and Histories
reports, “chapter headings and other important divisions of a text were distinguished by being written in red, while the rest of the book was written in black....Sections of a manuscript were also marked off with large ornate initial capital letters, which were often decorated with small paintings.
Miniatura
was used to describe these paintings as well. Since the paintings were nec-essarily very tiny,
miniatura
came to mean ‘a small painting or object of any kind.’”

Boor:
Originally meant “farmer.” (A “neighbor” was a near-farmer.) Originally the term had no pejorative meaning... but over time city dwellers, who fancied themselves as being more refined than their country cousins, interpreted the word to mean “ill-mannered,” “unrefined,” or “rude”—so much so that the original meaning was lost entirely.

Nickname:
From the Middle English word
ekename
, which meant “additional name.” Where did the “n” come from? From the definite article an, which frequently proceeded the word. Over time “an ekename” became “a nekename”...and then finally “a nickname.”

The average Japanese home has 7 times more clocks than the average American home does.

While JFK was president, reporters quoted the Kennedy family motto a lot: “Don’t get mad, get even.” Well, we all want to get back at someone once in a while. These guys did—and did it well
.

H
ERE, MY DEAR

Singer Marvin Gaye and Anna Gordy (sister of Motown founder Berry Gordy) had a bitter divorce battle. One of the terms of the settlement: Gaye had to give his ex-wife all the royalties from his next album. Gaye complied. He called the album
Here, My Dear
, and filled it with unrelenting, scathing attacks on her. Predictably, sales were a disappointing (to Anna and Motown) 400,000 copies. Added bonus: The episode got Gaye out of his contract with Motown—something he desperately wanted. He signed with Columbia Records, where he produced some of the bestselling albums of his career.

NOTABLE EFFORT

“At a London party in the 1920s, Mrs. Ronald Greville slipped an inebriated butler a note saying, ‘You are drunk. Leave the room at once.’ He put the note on a silver tray and presented it to the guest of honor, British Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain.”

—Esquire
magazine

REWRITING HISTORY

In 1976, Robert Redford put together the film version of
All the President’s Men
, the story of how two
Washington Post
reporters broke the Watergate scandal.

Post
publisher Katherine Graham signed the contracts approving the project...then started worrying about her newspaper’s image. She told her lawyers to try to stop the film—or at least keep the
Post
’s name out of it. This infuriated Redford.

“An early version of the script had referred to her as ‘the unsung heroine’ of the story,’” writes Stephen Bates, “and Patricia Neal had been considered for the role. Now Redford ordered that the Graham character be
eliminated
.” Redford left in only one reference to Graham: the scene in which “John Mitchell tells [reporter Carl] Bernstein that, if a certain story is published, ‘Katie Graham’s gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer.’”

—If No News, Send Rumors

Car accidents are most likely at 1 a.m. on Sunday and least likely at 5 a.m. on Friday.

HAVE A CIGARETTE, DEAR?

BUCHAREST, Romania—“A man who was heckled by his wife to stop smoking left everything to her on condition she take up his habit as punishment for 40 years of ‘hell.’

“Marin Cemenescu, who died at the age of 76, stipulated in his will that in order to inherit his house and $30,000 estate, his 63-year-old wife, Aneta, would have to smoke five cigarettes a day for the rest of her life.

“‘She could not stand to see me with a cigarette in my mouth, and I ended up smoking in the bathroom like a schoolboy,’ Cemenescu wrote in his will. ‘My life was hell.’”

—San Francisco Chronicle

DRUNKEN VEEP

When President Abe Lincoln ran for his second term of office, he dumped his first-term vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, in favor of Andrew Johnson. Hamlin wasn’t too happy about it. But he did get a measure of revenge.

“The morning that Lincoln and Johnson were to be inaugurated,” writes Steven Talley, “Hamlin stopped by Johnson’s (formerly his) office. Johnson was ill with typhoid and quite nervous about [the event]. When he complained to Hamlin that he could stand a shot of whiskey, the teetotaler Hamlin immediately sent an aide for a bottle. Johnson poured himself a few extra-stiff drinks.” Then Johnson gave one of the most embarrassing inaugural speeches in history—long, rambling, completely drunken. “No doubt,” says Talley, “Hamlin acted as shocked as the rest of the crowd.”

—
Bland Ambition

WHAT ISLAND?

“In revenge for England’s closing of the Libyan embassy in London, Col. Muammar el-Khadafy ordered that England be deleted from all Libyan maps in the mid-’80s. In its place, he put a new arm of the North Sea, bordered by Scotland and Wales.”

—
More News of the Weird

Q: What’s the fastest two-footed animal on Earth? A: The ostrich.

Some dinosaurs are extinct...and others we only
wish
were extinct—like Barney. You have to wonder why anyone thought the Barney blitz would succeed...and then you have to wonder why it did. Here’s one version, written by Jack Mingo, the author of
How the Cadillac Got Its Fins.

H
ow did Barney, a 6′4″ purple-and-green dinosaur, capture the hearts and minds of two- and three-year-olds everywhere? It depends on who you ask.

THE LEGEND

The story told by the company—and reported in
Time
and other news sources, goes something like this:

Sheryl Leach, a simple mother and schoolteacher, was driving down the highway in Dallas in 1988 with her restless toddler Patrick, wondering how to get a little free time for herself.

At the time, the only thing that could hold Patrick’s attention was a “Wee Sing” video featuring colorful characters and music. Suddenly, Leach had an inspiration: Why not try making a video herself? “How hard could it be?” she thought. “I could do that.”

She got a schoolteacher friend named Kathy Parker to help, borrowed some money, and voila! Barney was born.

THE TRUTH

The real story makes Barney seem a little more like what he is—an extremely clever business venture.

Leach, the inspired mom, was actually working as a “software manager” for a successful religious and education publisher named DLM, Inc., which, umm, they forgot to mention was owned by her father-in-law, Richard Leach.

And Parker may have been a schoolteacher, but she was working as an “early childhood product manager” for the same company when Barney was born.

And hey, what a lucky break! DLM had just built video production facilities and was looking to branch into the lucrative kids’ video market when Leach had her brainstorm. In fact, Leach’s father-in-law invested $1 million to develop Barney and even provided the services of a video education specialist who was creating a real-estate training series for DLM at the time.

The ratio of lobbyists to senators in Washington, D.C. is 74 to 1.

HOW BARNEY MADE IT TO TV

In
How the Cadillac Got Its Fins
, Jack Mingo writes: “DLM created eight videos starring Sandy Duncan; they sold more than four million copies. One of those copies came to the attention of the executive vice president for programming at Connecticut Public Broadcasting, Larry Rifkin.

“It was Super Bowl Sunday. Rifkin took his four-year-old daughter to the video store to rent some tapes so he could watch the game in peace. ‘Leora walked out with “Barney and the Backyard Gang” and she watched the program and watched the program and watched the program. So I decided to take a look and see what it was she enjoying,’ said Rifkin. He tracked down the manufacturer and made a deal to purchase 30 episodes for his station.”

From there, the whole phenomenon just took off. Leach and Co. reportedly made $100 million from Barney in 1993 alone.

BARNEY VS. THE WORLD

Maybe it’s the color purple...maybe it’s that dippy voice. Whatever it is, Barney aroused some pretty potent passions. For example:

• The Rev. Joseph Chambers, a North Carolina radio preacher, thinks Barney is proof that “America is under siege from the powers of darkness.” He put out a pamphlet called
Barney the Purple Messiah
, charging that Barney is a New Age demon bent on introducing America’s children to the occult.

• The University of Nebraska held a “Barney Bashing Day,” which featured boxing with a Barney look-alike.

• In Worcester, Massachusetts, a college student jumped out of a car, shouted obscenities and assaulted a woman who had dressed as Barney to help celebrate the opening of a drug store. “I said, ‘Why are you doing this to me?’” the woman told police, “And he said, ‘Because we...hate Barney!’” One little boy who witnessed the attack said, “I’m going home to get my gun, Barney. And I’m going to shoot him.”

Most popular junk food in New England: potato chips. In the Southeastern U.S.: cheese puffs.

Many of our most treasured national landmarks and monuments were neglected—and sometimes almost destroyed—before anyone managed to rescue them. See if you can figure out what happened to them. Answers are on
page 671
.