Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader (16 page)

Origin:
“From Latin
caput
, a ‘head’ of cattle. Cattle are one of the oldest forms of wealth: they are movable; grow; bear interest (milk); and provide capital gains (calves).” (From
Remarkable Words
, by John Train)

GIBBERISH

Meaning:
Unintelligible or nonsensical talk or writing

Origin:
“This word was influenced by the 11th century Arabian alchemist,
Geber
, who, to avoid death on a charge of dealing with the devil, wrote his treatises in apparent nonsense.” (From
Dictionary of Word Origins
, by Joseph T. Shipley)

CHAUFFEUR

Meaning:
One employed to drive a private automobile

Origin:
“The French word
chauffeur
comes from the verb
chauffer
, ‘to heat.’ A
chauffeur
was originally the ‘fireman’ on a steam train, whose job it was to shovel fuel into the boiler and maintain a head of steam. Steam-powered cars worked on the same principle (it took as long as 15 minutes to produce steam from a cold boiler) but this time the
chauffeur
was often also the driver.” (From
The Chronology of Words and Phrases
, by Linda and Roger Flavell)

JINX

Meaning:
An omen of bad luck

Origin:
“At the turn of the 20th century, some people used animals and birds for fortune-telling. One of the most popular was the wryneck woodpecker—commonly known in the Southeast as the
jinx
. Many who paid for information from a jinx regretted it: Too often the good predictions didn’t come true, while the bad ones did. Disaster followed a reading so often that the bird’s name came to stand for bad luck.” (From
Why You Say It
, by Webb Garrison)

In Switzerland, it is illegal to flush a toilet or pee standing up after 10 p.m.

Can he really do anything a spider can?

C
OMIC BOOK SCIENCE

A radioactive spider bit Peter Parker, endowing him with all the power and abilities of a spider: super speed, super strength, the ability to climb walls, and an uncanny “spider sense.” But how truly similar to a spider is Spider-Man?

•
Spider Strength:
Spiders aren’t really all that strong. Many insects, such as ants, can carry as much as 60 times their own weight, but spiders, which are arachnids, can’t.

•
Spider Speed:
Spiders are not particularly fast for their size. Trying to keep track of eight legs at once, without tying themselves in knots, limits their speed and coordination.

•
Spider Sense:
Spiders are covered with
setae
—stiff hairlike structures that collect sensory information and relay it to the brain. But while setae can detect slight air movement (to determine if captured prey is edible), they can’t warn a spider of imminent danger.

•
Wall Climbing:
Only a few of the world’s 35,000 species of spiders have the ability to walk up walls and cling to ceilings. Hunting spiders have a group of hairs, called
scopula
, located between their claws. The multi-stranded hairs are covered with moisture, which allows them to stick to slick surfaces. This is the only one of Spider-Man’s powers that is directly related to spiders.

•
Web Spinning:
In the movies, Spidey shoots webs from his wrists as a natural part of his powers, but in the original comic book, Peter Parker invented his web-shooters and web formula. So far, science hasn’t been able to create a compound that sprays out as a liquid and instantly hardens into a silken rope, sticks to walls (but not hands), or can be formed into a net for capturing criminals.

Spiders produce the silk for their webs in their abdomens, so if Peter had developed
real
spider powers, his silk probably would not have come from his wrists. Where would it come from? Well...let’s just say the Spider-Man movies would have lost their PG-13 rating.

Dirty movie: Tom Cruise went weeks without bathing while filming
The Outsiders
.

Step into Uncle John’s Groovy Time Machine and we’ll travel back the 1970s, when no bathroom was complete without...

R
UBBER DUCKIES.
After muppets Bert and Ernie first sang the song “Rubber Duckie” on
Sesame Street
in 1970 the little yellow ducks became a bathroom fixture.

AQUA VELVA.
“There’s something about an Aqua Velva man,” said the beautiful blond woman in the commercial, and millions of men believed her.

JOHNSON’S “NO MORE TEARS” SHAMPOO.
It hit the market in 1954, but it wasn’t until the ’70s that No More Tears became the best-selling American shampoo.

AN EARTH-TONE BATHROOM SUITE.
“Earth tones” were in. Green wasn’t green—it was
avocado
. Yellow wasn’t yellow—it was
harvest gold
. Brown wasn’t brown—it was
chocolate
. By today’s standards, they’re hard to look at (especially in combinations), but they were all the rage in the 1970s.

FLOWER-SHAPED NON-SLIP BATH DECALS.
The last remnants of the 1960s Flower Power fad ended up keeping people safe when getting in and out of the tub.

THE SHOWER MASSAGE.
German company Hansgrohe introduced the first hand-held, adjustable showerhead, the
Selecta
, in 1968. Soon they were everywhere. In 1974 Teledyne came out with probably the most famous one, The Original Shower Massage.

A FUZZY TOILET SEAT COVER.
Basically a shag carpet on top of the toilet seat cover, it had one major drawback: When guys used the toilet, the thick cover would make the seat fall down... mid-stream, so to speak.

TIDY BOWL.
In the 1970s, blue toilet water was clean toilet water. And then there was the Tidy Bowl Man, that little guy in the captain’s suit in the boat inside the toilet tank.

AND TO READ?
Sadly, there were no good books made especially for the bathroom...yet.

Bee stings are acidic, wasp stings are alkali.

Think you’ve seen every
Star Wars
movie? Wrong!

C
LONE WARS

Released in May 1977,
Star Wars
was one of the highest grossing movies of all time. Cast members became instant stars and any toy or product with the
Star Wars
logo flew off store shelves. Fans couldn’t get enough. Still, the producers were worried. The sequel wouldn’t come out for three more years. How could they make sure fans wouldn’t lose interest?

Director George Lucas came up with an idea: “The
Star Wars
Holiday Special,” a two-hour TV show to air near Thanksgiving, 1978. Lucas wrote a story about how the
Star Wars
characters celebrated Christmas, or “Life Day,” as they called it. The plot of the program would follow Chewbacca’s family (his wife Malla, son Lumpy, and elderly father Itchy) as they awaited Chewbacca’s return home for the holiday. But Han Solo and Chewbacca would be held up by Darth Vader, bent on ruining Life Day for the entire universe. They’d fight him off and make it home to Wookie world...just in time for “Life Day!”

THE SAGA BEGINS

Lucas sold the idea to ABC. Who wouldn’t want a chance to take on
Star Wars
? It might have been a Christmas classic, but by the time production was scheduled to start, Lucas was too busy with the early stages of making
The Empire Strikes Back
. ABC left the Holiday Special in the hands of a team of novice staff writers who had worked mostly on short-lived TV variety shows.

Early on, it looked like the show might be pretty good. Almost all of the original cast agreed to appear. The production team behind
Star Wars
was on board for special effects and makeup. There would be cameo appearances from some of TV’s biggest stars—Harvey Korman (
The Carol Burnett Show
), Diahann Carroll (
Julia
), and Beatrice Arthur (
Maude
). Advertisements promised never-before-seen action sequences of Han Solo and Chewbecca flying through space fighting Darth Vader’s spaceships. It looked like a surefire winner.

Q: What do your coccyx and appendix have in common? Nobody knows what they’re for.

THE MEDIOCRE STRIKES BACK

The Star Wars Holiday Special
aired at 8 p.m. on November 17, 1978. All expectations instantly evaporated during the first fifteen minutes, which consisted of Chewbacca’s family arguing in Wookie language...without subtitles. That foreshadowed the rest of the program: a tacky variety show with a
Star Wars
theme. It had no plot. It mostly showed Chewbacca’s whining, grunting relatives watching 3-D television, with sequences that included Beatrice Arthur in an off-key song-and-dance number; a virtual reality erotic dance from Diahann Carroll; a performance of “Light the Sky on Fire” by Jefferson Starship; and a cooking show with a six-armed Harvey Korman in drag. It all concluded with a “Life Day” carol sung by Princess Leia—to the tune of the
Star Wars
theme song. (Actress Carrie Fisher later confessed that she was “highly medicated” during filming.) As the show progressed and each sequence became more outlandish than the last, most of the 20 million viewers flipped over to
Wonder Woman
.

REBEL FIGHTERS

Today, anybody with a DVD player can see any classic movie anytime. In 1978, however, the prospect of seeing
Star Wars
in your own home was irresistible, which explains why ratings were so high, but despite the initially large audience, reviews were awful and true fans hated it.

So did George Lucas.

He was furious that the special had corrupted his beloved characters. Because of his anger (and his clout), Lucas managed to prevent
The Star Wars Holiday Special
from ever airing again. He assumed that the show would be an unfortunate, but quickly forgotten misstep in his career. But that’s not what happened. 1978 was the beginning of the VCR revolution, so many viewers taped the show, which set into motion a vast bootlegging network that widely distributes this otherwise forgettable flop to this day. Though most copies are of very poor quality, they can still be obtained cheaply over the Internet. Lucas was forced to give up on his goal of cleansing his reputation by erasing the
Holiday Special
from existence. “If I had the time and a sledgehammer,” he once commented, “I would track down every bootlegged copy of that program and smash it.”

Makes sense: Streetlamps in Hershey, Pennsylvania, are shaped like chocolate kisses.

Actors are a superstitious lot. For example, productions of
Macbeth
have a history of injuries and deaths, so to ward off bad luck, actors usually refer to it as “the Scottish play.” Here are some other theater superstitions
.

L
EAVE THE LIGHT ON

Some theaters are old and dingy places, perfect haunts for ghosts. So it’s become standard practice to have at least one light glowing onstage around the clock, even when the theater is empty. This “ghost light” is meant to ward off bad spirits. Some theater companies use an old floor lamp with a bare bulb (which, in a way, casts exactly the eerie feeling it’s meant to dispel).

GOOD DRESS REHEARSAL, BAD LUCK

A perfect dress rehearsal is an omen that a play will have a short run. That’s because the cast and crew tend to feel prepared after a good final rehearsal. If they’re too confident, they might lose their nervous edge and goof up. So to avoid a completely perfect final rehearsal, the last line of the play isn’t spoken until the actual performance. If it’s omitted, the rehearsal isn’t “perfect.”

OLD GEEZERS, GOOD LUCK

The “front of the house”—the box office and the lobby—has its own superstitions. One of them is that if the first person to purchase a ticket for a play is an old man or woman, it means the play will have a long, profitable run. But if a young person is the first ticket buyer, the play is doomed to close quickly.

DON’T WHISTLE BACKSTAGE

Theater people believe that whistling backstage brings bad luck to a production. Like most superstitions, there’s no definitive explanation for the origin—it may date back to when sailors were hired to run the rope system that lowered and raised curtains and scenery. Sailors were a good choice, given their skill with knots and manning sails, but they were used to receiving orders via a bosun’s whistle. Thus, the backstage worry: if a sailor heard a whistle, he might lower a heavy curtain or piece of scenery at the wrong time, injuring the actors onstage.

Storage unit: You can fit 600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in a thimble.

Stagecoach travel has been glamorized by Hollywood: a handsome hero in an immaculate white shirt and string necktie, and a neatly coiffured heroine swaying gently as the stage races across the prairie. Romantic? Yes. Truthful? No. Stagecoaches didn’t race—good drivers averaged 5 mph. And passengers arrived covered with dust and aching from the bone-rattling journey. These rigorous conditions created discord, so at every station, Wells Fargo posted this list
.