Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader (69 page)

HAVING THEIR SAY

On the first day of the hearings, Cobb and Hart testified in favor of testing the women. Then it was Cochran’s turn. And just as Cobb and Hart had feared, Cochran told the committee that there was “no shortage of well-trained and long-experienced male pilots to serve as astronauts,” and that adding women to the mix would “slow down our [space] program and waste a great deal of money.”

The first time the word “hell” was spoken on television: on a 1967 episode of
Star Trek
.

On the second day of testimony, the committee questioned George Low, NASA’s director of spacecraft and flight missions, and then questioned astronauts John Glenn and Scott Carpenter. None of the men were receptive to the idea of allowing women into their ranks. Like Cochran, Glenn argued that testing women for the space program was a waste of money, since NASA had already spent millions of dollars training men for the job and had all the astronauts it needed. “The men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them,” Glenn said. “The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.”

THE END

The hearings were scheduled to last for three days, but shortly before noon on the second day, Congressman Victor Anfuso of New York, who chaired the hearings, banged his gavel and called the proceedings to a close. He had collected enough information to write his report, he explained, so no further testimony was necessary.

“NASA’s program of selection is basically sound,” the final report stated, acknowledging that at “some time in the future” NASA should revisit the possibility of conducting “research to determine the advantages to be gained by utilizing women as astronauts.”

The Mercury 13 program was over, this time for good.

WE’RE (NOT) #1

Less than a year later, on June 16, 1963, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, a mill worker and parachuting hobbyist, became the first woman in space. How much longer would it take an
American
woman to make the same trip? Twenty years.

In 1983 physicist Sally Ride became the first when she made a six-day flight on the space shuttle
Challenger
. But Ride was a flight engineer, and did not pilot the shuttle. The first woman to command a space shuttle mission was Lieutenant Colonel Eileen Collins, who piloted the
Columbia
into orbit in 1999—nearly 40 years after the first Mercury space mission.

Female mosquitoes are deaf.

UPDATE

Where are the Mercury 13 now? Some have passed away, others are still flying, and two of them—Jerrie Cobb and Wally Funk—still hope to fly in space.

When 77-year-old John Glenn returned to space aboard the space shuttle in October 1998 as part of a scientific study on the effects of aging, Cobb’s supporters launched a campaign to get her included on a future mission. At the time, NASA officials said they still have no plans to send Cobb into space, and the grounding of the entire space shuttle program following the
Columbia
disaster in 2003 makes her chances even more remote.

Wally Funk, now 64, isn’t waiting for NASA to come around. Over the years, she has completed her astronaut testing at her own expense, even traveling to Russia in 2000 to train with Russian cosmonauts. She is currently working as a test pilot for Interorbital Systems, a California-based company that plans to launch privately owned, privately funded spacecraft. “I’m still pedaling! I never lost the faith,” she told the
Los Angeles Times
in January 2004. “Whether we make it with Interorbital or not, I’m going to make it. I don’t know how, but I know it’s going to happen.”

UNCLE JOHN’S PUZZLER

Using only one straight line, make this equation true.

5 + 5 + 5 = 550

(One possible answer is to add a line through the equal sign so it becomes a “does not equal” sign, but there is a much more clever solution than that.)

Answer
:

Add a line to the first plus sign so it becomes a 4. 545 + 5 = 550

Do they hold their nose? Elephants fart more than any other animal.

Once again, we bare all to bring you all the news that’s fit to print
.

N
UDE...
In February 2004, a Madison, Maine, businessman named Normand St. Michel announced he was having second thoughts about opening a topless coffee shop, even after the planning board approved his business application. Why the change of heart? St. Michel started to worry about “the potential danger of semi-nude waitresses serving hot coffee.”

PRUDE...
The Indonesian parliament introduced an amendment to the country’s anti-pornography bill that would make kissing in public punishable by a $29,000 fine and up to five years in jail. “I think there must be some restrictions on such acts,” said Aisyah Hamid Baidlowi, head of the committee that introduced the bill. “They are against our traditions of decency.”

NUDE...
In April 2004, the Yamato Wind Village restaurant in Kunming, China, announced a promotion in which it planned to serve sushi on the bodies of naked women, but health officials banned the event before it could take place. “Some residents were indignant, claiming that it is humiliating to women,” the
China Daily
newspaper reported, “but others were curious and tempted to have a try.”

PRUDE...
In 1999 school officials in two Georgia school districts spent two entire weeks applying touch-up paint to a picture of the famous painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware” in more than 2,300 fifth-grade social studies textbooks. Why? They feared that kids would mistake the ornamental orbs of Washington’s pocket watch, which lay across his right thigh in the painting, for his family jewels. “
I
know what it is and
I
know what it is supposed to be,” said Muscogee County Schools Superintendent Guy Sims. “But I also know fifth-grade students and how they might react to it.”

Q: What do you call the skin that peels off after a sunburn? A:
Blype
.

NUDE...
In May 2004, 60 partiers on Austin’s Lake Travis capsized their double-decker party barge, known as Club Fred. The cause of the accident is still under investigation. One theory: According to onlookers, the boat started to tip over when everyone aboard crowded over to one side to gawk at the sunbathers at Hippie Hollow, the only nude beach in Texas.

PRUDE...
In May 2004, Louisiana state representative Derrick Shepherd introduced legislation to criminalize the wearing of low-slung pants or any other clothing “that intentionally exposes undergarments or any portion of the pubic hair, cleft of buttocks, or genitals.” While reading the bill, Representative Shepherd was repeatedly interrupted by laughter, catcalls, and by Representative Tommy Wright’s chants of “No more crack! No more crack!”

NUDE...
Indianapolis police arrested Erica Meredith, 25, as she was picking up her eight-year-old daughter at school in January 2004. The charge: “Disseminating matter harmful to minors,” a felony punishable by up to three years in prison and a $10,000 fine. The crime: She was driving her boyfriend’s car, which had a three-by-five-foot painting of a naked woman airbrushed on the hood. The prosecutor dropped the charges after the boyfriend agreed to airbrush a bikini onto the painting.

BONUS: PRUDISH NUDISTS!

•
Desert Shadows Inn Resort and Villas, a nude resort in Palm Springs, California, has installed a $500,000, 110-foot-long bridge over a busy street that separates nudist condominiums from the rest of the resort. Now nudists can cross the street without being gawked at by passing cars.

•
Nudists at Wreck Beach in Vancouver, Canada, are up in arms over a plan by the University of British Columbia to build two 20-story dorms on the cliffs above the beach. Nudists worry that privacy will vanish when college students are able to spy on them with binoculars and Web cams. University vice president Dennis Pavlich says they don’t need to worry—the university’s board members have to sign off on the dorm plans, and they aren’t about to sign off on housing that provides a view of the beach. “All that’s been approved so far is the concept,” he says.

Average lifespan of an NBA basketball: 10,000 bounces.

Here are more answers to life’s important questions from the people who know—trivia experts
.

S
PILT MILK

Q:
Why does milk turn sour?

A:
“Because bacteria grow in it. If you were to boil milk and put it in a sterile container, it
couldn’t
turn sour, because the boiling and sterilization would have killed the bacteria. In America, most milk is
pasteurized—
heated to 145 degrees Fahrenheit for a period of 30 minutes. This process kills those bacteria known to be harmful to humans. Some bacteria survive the heat, but these aren’t harmful to humans. Still, if you don’t keep your milk in a cool place, it is these bacteria which will turn it sour. Most people don’t like the taste, but fresh clean milk which has gone sour is not harmful.” (From
A Book of Curiosities
, by Roberta Kramer)

YOU’RE THE TOP

Q:
Why do chefs wear those funny-looking hats?

A:
“A chef’s hat is tall and balloons at the top so as to counteract the intense heat in the kitchen; the unique shape allows air to circulate around the scalp, keeping the head cool.” (From
Who Knew?
, by David Hoffman)

SHATTERED

Q:
Can you really break a wineglass by singing?

A:
“Yes, it really can happen. Sound does special things to objects as it bumps into them. Depending on how fast the sound vibrates, it can even make them move. When an object is pushed by sound and continues to be pushed so that it exaggerates its natural rhythm, resonance occurs. All hard substances have what is called
resonant frequency
. Glass has a high frequency, which means that only a very high sound can break it. No musical instrument or human voice can produce a pure note, but female singers’ top notes are claimed to be higher than the resonant frequency of glass, and in the right combination are strong enough to break certain kinds, particularly delicate wineglasses.” (From
Why?
, by Eric Laithwaite)

Fish yawn.

FLAKING IT

Q:
How do they know that no two snowflakes are alike?

A:
“There are sound scientific reasons why this is so. Every snowflake starts out looking pretty much the same: a simple hexagonal crystal that forms on a particle of dust. But as it falls through a cloud, it grows and changes form dramatically. Depending on how cold and moist it is inside the cloud, a snowflake can assume many different shapes. And then as it descends, it tends to grow one way, then another, building on itself in an endlessly complex pattern. Says John Hallett of the Desert Research Institute in Reno, ‘Two snowflakes would look alike if they followed the exact same trajectory as they fell through the sky—but they don’t.’” (From
Why Moths Hate Thomas Edison
, edited by Hampton Sides)

VACUUM-WHACKED

Q:
In the movies, people explode when they’re sucked out into the vacuum of space. Would this really happen?

A:
“Here on Earth, at sea level, the air is squeezing our bodies at a pressure of about one kilogram per square centimeter. The higher you go, the less pressure there is squeezing your body. If you go out into space, there is no pressure at all. You become, basically, a bag of skin containing the fluids and gases that are inside. In the movies, they exaggerate the effect, but as the pressure of the air is released, all of the gases that are dissolved in your blood are going to bubble out. While your body wouldn’t explode, the fluids would start to form bubbles in your blood vessels and this would cause damage. You’d have a fatal case of the bends, and you’d be done for.” (From
Quirks and Quarks Question Book
, released by CBC Radio One)