Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader (29 page)

The thought has often come into my mind

If I ever shall see thy glorious behind.

ROYAL SHAFT

In 2003 the British government leaked to the media a list of 300 artists, actors, and others who had refused knighthoods or titles such as Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Some examples:

•
Winston Churchill declined a knighthood in 1945 because he was embarrassed after being voted out as prime minister. He finally accepted the honor in 1953—when he became prime minister again.

•
Actress Helen Mirren turned down a Commander of the Order of the British Empire title in 1996 because she opposed the conservative government. When the liberal Labor party returned to power in 2003, Mirren happily accepted the title of Dame Helen.

•
Poet Benjamin Zephaniah publicly rejected an Officer of the Order of the British Empire award because the title reminded him of “thousands of years of brutality” and English imperialism.

•
Actor Albert Finney declined knighthood in 2000 because he felt the awards system contributed to the stereotype that the British are snobs.

Your eye muscles move an average of 100,000 times a day.

Ever wonder what inspired your favorite songs? Here are the inside stories of some popular tunes
.

T
he Artist:
Rick Nelson

The Song:
“Garden Party” (1972)

The Story:
Nelson was a teen idol in the early days of television, performing rock ’n’ roll songs weekly on
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet
from the mid-1950s until the show was cancelled in 1966. In 1971 Nelson played a nostalgia show at New York’s Madison Square Garden. The audience came to hear his hits (“Poor Little Fool,” “Travelin’ Man,” etc.), so when Nelson played a set of new songs, he was booed off the stage. The next act, Chuck Berry, played only his hits (“Johnny B. Goode,” “Maybelline,” etc.) and the audience loved it. Frustrated and hurt, Nelson wrote “Garden Party” about the experience, with bitter lyrics like “if memories were all I sang I’d rather drive a truck.” Ironically, Nelson’s song about being rejected by audiences was embraced by those same audiences and became a top 10 smash. But he never had another hit.

The Artist:
Red Hot Chili Peppers

The Song:
“Under the Bridge” (1991)

The Story:
After a decade as a punk-funk band little known outside Los Angeles, the Chili Peppers were possibly the unlikeliest group to score a pop hit, especially with a ballad. While recording the album
Blood Sugar Sex Magik
, the group was grasping for ideas when producer Rick Rubin discovered Anthony Kiedis’s notebook and was moved by an unfinished poem the singer had written about his days as a homeless drug addict. He thought “Under the Bridge” would make a great song. Kiedis agreed to record it, figuring it would go nowhere. The album went on to sell 7 million copies, reach #2, and help make the Chili Peppers one of rock’s biggest acts.

The Artist:
Kyu Sakamoto

The Song:
“Sukiyaki” (1963)

The Story:
Sakamoto had Japan’s biggest hit of 1962 with “Ue O Muite Aruko” (“I Look Up When I Walk”). Louis Benjamin, a British record executive, heard the song while on vacation in Japan and brought it to an English musician, Kenny Ball, who’d had a hit with the import “Midnight in Moscow.” Figuring DJs wouldn’t be able to pronounce the title, Benjamin renamed it after the only Japanese word he knew, a beef-and-noodle dish called
sukiyaki
. Ball’s version was a minor hit, and that prompted a DJ in Pasco, Washington, to play Sakamoto’s original version. Listeners loved it. It gradually picked up steam, and was released by Capital Records under the name of the British version, “Sukiyaki.” It is the only song sung in Japanese ever to hit #1 on the U.S. charts.

KISS bassist Gene Simmons speaks four languages and has a B.A. in education.

The Artist:
Daryl Hall and John Oates

The Song:
“Rich Girl” (1977)

The Story:
Despite many years of hard work touring and recording, commercial success eluded Hall and Oates...until 1976, when Daryl Hall wrote this song. The inspiration: He had always despised an ex-boyfriend of his girlfriend: an obnoxious heir to a fast-food fortune who had had everything handed to him but appreciated nothing. Still, Hall thought “rich boy” might not sound right to record buyers, so he made the subject a “rich girl.” The song was the breakthrough hit they had been waiting for, going to #1 in March 1977. The group would go on to sell 40 million albums and become the bestselling duo in music history.

Strange fact:
Serial killer David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, told reporters that his murders were partially motivated by “Rich Girl.”

The Artist:
Frankie Goes to Hollywood

The Song:
“Relax” (1983)

The Story:
FGTH were arguably the biggest group since The Beatles to come out of Liverpool. As “Relax” climbed the English charts, a DJ for England’s Radio One read the lyrics as the song played. He was appalled and yanked the song off the air, calling it obscene. (The lyrics aren’t explicit, just sexually suggestive.) Radio One subsequently banned the song and BBC Television banned the video, but that of course only increased demand—people wanted to hear what the fuss was about. Result: The song hit the top of the charts. It later became popular in American dance clubs and has since become identified as one of the seminal songs of the 1980s.

The Spanish Inquisition was formally abolished in 1834.

Words associated with death and funerals are kind of creepy. But they didn’t start out that way
.

C
EMETERY.
The Greek verb
koiman
, meaning “to put to sleep,” led to the noun
koimeterion
, meaning “dormitory.” It was early Greek Christian writers who first used the Latin translation of that word—
coemeterium
—to describe burial grounds.

AUTOPSY.
A
combination of
auto
, meaning “done by oneself,” and
opsy
, meaning “seeing.” A
utopsy
literally means “seeing or discovering for oneself,” as in the true cause of someone’s death.

MORGUE.
The origin is French, despite the fact that it sounds like the Latin word
mors
, meaning “death.” Initially a
morgue
was a room in a prison where new (live) prisoners were examined so that their bodies could be recognized, if necessary, in the future.

CORONER.
From the Latin word
corona
, for “crown.”
Coronae
was once the title of an English officer whose duties included collecting the king’s income. English law stated that if someone died without a will, that person’s property became the king’s. It was the coronae’s job to investigate deaths and determine whether a will had been written.

EMBALM.
Stems from the Latin phrase
in balsamum
, which means “to put into balsam.” Ancient cultures used to preserve bodies by rubbing a mixture of aromatic plant resins called balsam on the skin of a corpse.

PALLBEARER.
Ancient Romans wore a square piece of cloth called a
pallium
over their shoulders. Over the centuries any covering came to be known as a “pall.” Pallbearers—the men who carry a coffin at a funeral—once carried it under a “pall.”

HEARSE.
In Old French,
hearse
was the word for a harrow, a triangular farming tool. At the time, triangular frames were used to hold candles at the head of a coffin, and so they adopted the same name. Then, because the frame used to transport a coffin from house to church was also decorated with candles, it too came to be known as a hearse. Carriages replaced the need for the frames, but the name stayed.

What do U.S. presidents Theodore Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan have in common? They were all members of the NRA—and they were all shot.

If schools handed out degrees for dumb, these teachers would have earned a Ph.D
.

S
UBJECT:
Biology

WINNER:
Miles Dowling, a carpentry teacher at North Shore Technical High School in Massachusetts

CREATIVE APPROACH:
Mr. Dowling is also interested in taxidermy, so when he saw a dead coyote in the middle of the road in March 2003, he tossed it in the back of his pickup truck and brought it to school. Later that day he showed his students how animals are skinned; some of them even got to touch the dead coyote.

Dowling’s students learned some other lessons when school administrators heard about the impromptu demonstration: 1) touching dead animals potentially exposes you to rabies, which is fatal if left untreated; 2) if the animal has been dead long enough, like the coyote, there’s no way to tell if it has rabies; and 3) if you touch the animal, you have to get some really painful rabies shots.

REACTION:
Dowling was suspended without pay, and the two students who touched the animal had to get the shots.

SUBJECT:
Motivational Speaking

WINNER:
Steven Rivers, a 7th-grade teacher in New York State

CREATIVE APPROACH:
Mr. Rivers, a teacher for more than 30 years, routinely called his seventh graders “dumb” and “retards” when they misbehaved or answered questions incorrectly, and repeatedly singled out one particular student as a “failure” who “would never do anything in life.” But why stop at words? In one incident he grabbed a student by the neck for giving the wrong answer to a math question.

REACTION:
After a 17-month investigation, state officials found Rivers guilty of “conduct unbecoming a teacher, administering corporal punishment, and insubordination.” He was put on unpaid leave for half a school year.

UPDATE:
The local school board appealed the state’s decision—they wanted Rivers fired. But at last report, he was planning to return to the classroom. “I’m looking forward to being back on the job,” he told reporters.

SUBJECT:
Chemistry

WINNER:
Karmen Bosma Van Beek, a Talented and Gifted Program instructor at Sheldon High School in Iowa

CREATIVE APPROACH:
On a school-sponsored trip to a mock trial competition in Des Moines in 2001, Mrs. Van Beek let some of her students sip from her alcoholic drink at dinner; afterward she shared a case of beer with four of them while they watched movies in her hotel room. When word of the beer bash circulated around school, Van Beek at first lied to cover her tracks and encouraged the students to do the same. She later confessed and attributed her misconduct to “stress from a difficult marriage.”

REACTION:
The state recommended that Van Beek get counseling and suspended her teaching license indefinitely.

SUBJECT:
Fashion

WINNER:
The Merriday Montessori School in Florida

CREATIVE APPROACH:
The Florida Department of Children and Families launched an investigation into the school after a teacher reported how she dealt with an unruly student: she put the five-year-old boy in a dress and had the other kids laugh at him. (It was a yellow dress with flowers on it.) An investigation revealed that it may have been done to other students, too.

SUBJECT:
Invisibility

WINNER:
Teachers at Gillepsie Middle School, Philadelphia

CREATIVE APPROACH:
In May 2004, 12-year-old Aubrey Wharton and his mother were summoned to appear in court to face truancy charges. The reason: records showed Aubrey had failed to attend class the previous year, and had the bad grades to show for it. Strangely, Aubrey freely admitted to not being at school. He was enrolled in a
different
school. Stranger still, along with two F’s, the boy received a D, a C, and even a B at the school he didn’t attend—and his behavior was graded as “excellent.” The school quickly dropped the truancy charges; how he got grades for those classes is under investigation.

Why is February 30, 11 B.C., famous? It was the last February 30 ever.

Everyone thinks their own horror stories about buying a new home are the worst, but they’re not—these are. Note: Some names have been changed to protect the gullible
.