Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (32 page)

PETALK
($34,
Coolpetstuff.com
):
Feel guilty when you leave your cat home alone? PeTalk plays a 10-second recording of your voice every hour while you’re gone. Kitty will either be comforted or think she’s going crazy.

ME-OW-TRAGEOUS GRAND SOPHISTI-CAT
($589.99,
PetsMart.com
): A cat-sized, solid wood grand piano, (covered in carpeting).

JOANNA SEERE, PET PSYCHIC
($90/hour):
Ms. Seere helps cats find peace through guided meditations…conducted over the phone. Says Seere: “Meditation is to help animals find themselves, find balance, and find wholeness.” Maybe she can help explain why you spent $589.99 on a cat piano.

PET DNA STORAGE
($600
to $1,400, plus annual fees):
For a fee, PerPETuate will store your cat’s genetic information in liquid nitrogen freezers. No one has cloned a cat yet, but once the technology arrives, thanks to PerPET-uate, you and Fluffy can be together forever.

MIRACLE BEAM LASER

TOY
($9.99,
PetsMart.com
): A standard laser pointer, packaged to look like a cat toy. Buy the optional “mouse hologram” and the red dot becomes shaped like a mouse.

CAT WEDDING GOWN

(
PetVogue.com
): This custom-made Elizabethan-style “gown” embellished with French lace and comes with a crystal tiara. Price: $1,650—probably more than your mother paid for her wedding dress.

KITTY GRASS
($30 plus overnight shipping, Priscilla’s):
No, not that kind of grass. This grass provides “a tender and tasty source of protein, vitamins, nutrients…and chlorophyll.”

Cats sleep about 14 hours a day; donkeys only sleep about 4.

Here’s
another list of the very first appearance of several things we take for granted. From
The Book of Firsts,
by Patrick Robertson.

Date:
1862

Background:
The first scientifically planned slimming diet was prescribed by Dr. William Harvey, an ear specialist, for an overweight London undertaker named William Banting. The Banting diet was based on the reduction of carbohydrates and was the precursor of most of today’s weight-reducing systems. In Banting’s case, it meant that the undertaker was obliged to forgo pastry, potatoes, pies, and all sweetstuffs and restrict himself to lean meat, fish, and fruit.

Within a year Banting had decreased his 203-pound bulk to a svelte 153 pounds. At first dieting tended to be a male preoccupation, but became a fashionable activity among women after 1914, when they ceased to distort their figures with corsets and stays.

Date:
1882

Background:
The first electric fan to be produced commercially was developed by Dr. Schuyler Skaats Wheeler, chief engineer of the Crocker & Curtis Electric Motor Co., New York. The company’s earliest models were two-bladed desk fans.

The first gear-driven oscillating electric fan was produced in the United States by the Eck Dynamo & Motor Co. in 1908. Previous types of “moving” fans were revolving models, which had the disadvantage of blowing in unwanted directions.

Date:
January 6, 1905

Background:
The first helicopter capable of lifting a person off the ground in vertical flight was designed by E. R. Mumbord to a specification titled “The Solution to Aerial Flight,” and built by William Denny & Bros., shipbuilders of Dumbarton, Scotland. The machine had six propellers, each 25 feet in diameter, powered by a 25-horsepower engine. Construction was originally of bamboo, but was later replaced by metal, which wouldn’t become waterlogged in a storm. By 1912 it had achieved tethered flights of up to 10 feet from the ground.

Half of all crimes are committed by people under the age of 18.

The first helicopter to achieve free flight was a twin-rotor machine designed by French cycle dealer Paul Cornu and test-flown at Lisieux on November 13, 1907. Powered by a 24 horsepower engine, the machine stayed in the air for 20 seconds at a height of 6 feet.

Date:
1913

Background:
Mrs. Georgia Thompson of Henderson, North Carolina, joined the Charles Broadwich stunt parachute team as a fifteen-year-old wife and mother in 1908, and made her first jump from a home-built biplane over Griffith Park, Los Angeles. In San Diego, on July 4, 1914, “Tiny” Broadwick, as she was know professionally, made the world’s first jump—man or woman—using a manually-operated parachute with a rip-cord.

Date:
1913

Background:
The first bathroom in the sky was on the giant Russian passenger transport,
Rusky Vitiaz,
designed by one Igor Sikorski. Whether this was an actual water-closet is doubtful—it is unlikely that Sikorski would have increased the load by carrying unnecessary supplies of water. Nevertheless, he was the first man who concerned himself with the problems of high-altitude sanitation. We salute him.

Date:
1900

Background:
The first motor hearse was an electric vehicle used for a funeral in Buffalo, New York. Fourteen other electric cars made up the funeral procession.

Long story: In England in 1558, beards were taxed according to their length.

Ever wonder what the different ingredients in your toothpaste do? Here’s the basic formula for most toothpastes and how they’re supposed to work.

W
ater.
Toothpaste is 30% to 45% water. Which means you’re paying about $2 a pound for that water.

Chalk.
The same variety that schoolteachers use. What is chalk? It’s the crushed remains of ancient ocean creatures. The exoskeletons retained their sharpness during the eons when they were buried, and they are one of the few things tough, yet gentle enough, to clean the hardest substance in the body, tooth enamel.

Titanium dioxide.
This stuff goes into white wall paint to make it bright. On your teeth, it paints over any yellowing for at least a few hours, until it dissolves and is swallowed.

Glycerine glycol.
To keep the mixture from drying out, glycerin glycol is whipped in. You know it as an ingredient in antifreeze.

Seaweed. A concoction made from the seaweed known scientifically as
Chrondrus crispus
is added. This oozes and stretches in all directions and holds the paste together.

Paraffin.
This petroleum derivative keeps the mixture smooth.

Detergent.
What good would toothpaste be without the foam and suds? The answer is: It would be perfectly fine…but the public demands foam and suds.

Peppermint oil, menthol, and saccharin.
These counteract the horrible taste of detergent.

Formaldehyde.
The same variety that’s used in anatomy labs. It kills the bacteria that creep into the tube from your brush and the bathroom counter.

Does this recipe for toothpaste turn you off? Take heart. Studies have shown that brushing with plain water can be almost as effective.

29% of men say the unstable economy “is making them watch more cartoons.”

What do you think
—
was King Arthur a real person, or is he purely the stuff of legend? Either way, he makes for a good story.

In England, the most popular tales of chivalry are the Welsh legends of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. No one knows for sure if there was a real person who served as the inspiration for Arthur… or if so, which historical figure it was. The earliest known mention of Arthur is a reference to a mighty warrier in “Gododdin,” a Welsh poem written about 600 A.D. Another 200 years would pass before Arthur received another mention, this time in
History of the Britons,
which credits him with winning 12 battles against Saxon invaders.

It’s likely that tales of Arthur were also spread by word of mouth, because when Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote down the tales of Arthur in his
History of the Kings of Britain
in 1135, he recorded Arthur’s birth in the late fifth century, childhood, military conquests, marriage to Guinevere, relationship with his mentor Merlin, and his death in 542 when he was mortally wounded in battle by his treacherous nephew Mordred. Geoffrey is also the first person to identify Arthur as a king, not just a warrior.

So where did Geoffrey of Monmouth get his information? He claimed to have gotten it from a “certain very ancient book written in the British language,” but did not identify it by name. Historians now believe there was no such book. They theorize that Geoffrey simply recorded the popular tales of his day, and when needed, made up his own details to fill in any gaps, drawing from legends surrounding leaders like Alexander the Great and Charlemagne. That didn’t stop readers from taking
History of the Kings of Britain
seriously—it served as the standard text on British history for more than 600 years.

Geoffrey of Monmouth wasn’t the first to invent tales about King Arthur, and he certainly wasn’t the last. In 1155 another writer, Wace of Jersey, introduced the concept of the Round Table; five years later, the French poet Chretien de Troyes wrote five Arthurian romances that are credited with introducing the Holy Grail and Sir Lancelot’s love affair with Queen Guinevere. A 13th-century French poet, Robert de Boron, contributed the famous story of the orphaned Arthur winning his crown by removing a magic sword from a stone.

Muscle cells live as long as you do. Skin cells live less than 24 hours.

One thing historians agree on is that even if a “King Arthur” really did live in England in the early sixth century, he and his knights did not live in castles, wear suits of armor, or fight in tournaments—because none of those things existed in the sixth century. So why is Arthur so closely associated with them? Because Geoffrey of Monmouth and other contributors to the Arthurian legend had no sense of how different life had been 600 years earlier. They, not Arthur, lived in an age of castles and knights in shining armor, and they filled their stories with the trappings of their own era. In the process they created a world for King Arthur that he, if he did really exist, would never have recognized.

What about the generations of knights that grew up listening to the chivalrous tales of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table—how well did they live up to the noble example set by their hero? Did they give to the sick and the poor? Did they protect orphans and the elderly? Did they respect women and treat captured knights with the same respect they’d bestow upon guests?

Not quite—medieval knights preached chivalry, but practicing it was another story, as Will Durant writes in
The Story of Civilization:

Theoretically the knight was required to be a hero, a gentleman, and a saint. All this, however, was chivalric theory. The hero who one day fought bravely in tournament might on another be a faithless murderer. He might [preach] of protecting the weak, and strike unarmed peasants down with a sword; he treated with scorn the manual worker and with frequent coarseness and occasional brutality the wife whom he had sworn to cherish and protect. He could hear Mass in the morning, rob a church in the afternoon, and drink himself into obscenity at night.

Starstruck: 41 countries have at least one star on their flag.

Sometimes we’re blessed with it, sometimes we’re cursed with it
—
dumb luck. Here are some examples of people who have lucked out…for better or worse.

Keith Quick, 28, a homeless man in Omaha, Nebraska, climbed into a dumpster and went to sleep. Bad move—he happened to do it on garbage pickup day and was still sleeping when the garbage truck emptied the dumpster into its compactor and crushed it. Quick cried out for help but it wasn’t until the trash had been compacted two or three more times that the garbage men finally heard him. The trash was compressed so tightly that it took firefighters more than an hour to dig him out. Incredibly, he suffered no serious injuries.

In 1990, 14-year-old Lisa Reid went permanently blind as the result of a brain tumor. Then one night about 10 years later, she smacked her head on a coffee table as she was bending down to kiss her guide dog goodnight. When she woke up the next morning, 80% of the vision in her left eye had been restored. She celebrated the miracle “by telephoning her mother and reading aloud the health warning on a packet of cigarettes.”