Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (36 page)

The world’s largest igloo, built in Wisconsin in 2010, was big enough to hold 200 people.

STREET
SONGS

For generations of kids, the songs on
Sesame Street
were the first pop songs they ever heard. Here are the stories behind some favorite ones
.

“C
IS FOR COOKIE”
In 1971
Sesame Street
mastermind Jim Henson, puppeteer Jerry Juhl, head writer Jeff Moss, and chief song-writer Joe Raposo decided to write a sketch for every letter of the alphabet. One of the Muppets’ biggest hits was the song they came up with for
C
: “C Is for Cookie,” sung by Cookie Monster (Frank Oz) while sitting on a giant letter
C
, with a monster chorus singing operatic background vocals. Raposo wrote the song, which debuted on a
Sesame Street
album in 1971 and aired on TV in 1972. Raposo was also the original inspiration for Cookie Monster. He was a ravenous fan of cookies—so much so that when he died in 1989, his family had a milk-and-cookies reception instead of a wake.

“MAHNA MAHNA”

This song is more famous from
The Muppet Show
. It was the basis of the very first sketch on the very first episode in 1975: A crazy-looking jazz singer puppet named Mahna Mahna (pronounced “ma-náh ma-náh”), dressed in a green fuzzy vest, with wild orange hair, sang the nonsense song “Mahna Mahna” as he bounced on, off, and around the screen. But the song debuted on episode 14 of
Sesame Street
in 1969, as performed by a puppet named Bip Bippadotta. (It also made quite an impression when the Muppets performed it on
The Ed Sullivan Show
that same year.) The premise of the sketch was always the same—the nonsense words “mahna mahna” repeated over and over, sung calmly at first, then veering wildly out of control. It’s one of the few well-known
Sesame Street
songs not written specifically for the show. It was actually written by Italian composer Piero Umiliani for a the 1968 movie
Sweden, Heaven and Hell
—a soft-core porn film.

“I” is for inflation: A birdseed milkshake on
Sesame Street
cost 20¢ in 1969. In 2010: $2.99.

“BEIN’ GREEN”

In 1970 producer Jon Stone asked Joe Raposo to “write a song for the frog,” meaning Kermit, and gave him educational guidelines for the lyrics, a common practice on the show. Stone said it had to be about making kids feeling special and unique. He even gave Raposo some lyrics to work from. Raposo hammered out a song in which Kermit laments being green because it’s ordinary, but ultimately realizing that it’s beautiful. The lyric, “It’s not easy being green,” became a catchphrase in the early 1970s, and was also interpreted as an anti-racist sentiment. Although many of the lyrics used in “Bein’ Green” were written by Stone, he didn’t ask for a songwriting credit. Raposo ended up being listed as the sole writer of the song and Stone lost out on millions in royalties.

“CAN YOU TELL ME HOW TO GET TO SESAME STREET?”

Jon Stone wanted the show’s theme song to build momentum and excitement—exactly what an opening song should do. “Running happily, tumbling, playing along the way, but always intent on getting to
Sesame Street
,” is how Stone put it in his memoir. He liked the catchy, toy-piano-driven sing-song melody that Joe Raposo and co-writer Bruce Hart came up with but hated the lyrics—he thought they were trite and full of clichés (“Sunny day, sweeping the clouds away”), with references he felt would be dated, like “everything’s A-OK,” which Stone derided as “astronaut slang.” Nevertheless, it’s been the theme song for the show’s entire run (although it was remade several times—most notably as a calypso version in 1993 and a hip-hop version in 2007).

T IS FOR TRIVIA

•
“Sing.”
This Raposo ballad, about trying to do things even if you’re afraid you aren’t good at them, was written for the show in 1970 and was sung on the show in English, Spanish, and even sign language. It’s the most-performed song on
Sesame Street
. (It’s been sung by more than 50 performers.) The Carpenters recorded it in 1973, and it became a #3 pop hit.

•
“Rubber Duckie.”
While rubber ducks had been around since the 1890s (with the availability of cheap rubber), it wasn’t until this song was featured on
Sesame Street
in 1970 that they became really popular, becoming the definitive kids’ bath toy (as well as the mascot for a certain trivia book). The song itself was popular, too. Singing it as “Ernie,” Jim Henson hit #16 on the pop chart with “Rubber Duckie” in 1970.

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TOILET TECH

Better living through bathroom technology
.

T
AG, YOU’RE IT
Product:
Linen Trackers
How They Work:
The days of checking out of your hotel with your suitcase stuffed with the hotel’s bath towels will be a thing of the past if Linen Technology Tracking of Miami, Florida, has its way: The company has developed a washable version of those anti-shoplifter ID tags that sound an alarm if you take merchandise out of a store without paying for it. The tags can be sewn into towels, bathrobes, bedspreads, and anything else the hotel thinks you might be tempted to abscond with. LTT says that a Honolulu hotel that installed the system to keep track of its pool towels cut thefts from 4,000 towels per month to just 750—a savings of $16,000 a month. (If hotels pass the savings on to consumers in the form of lower room rates, you might save enough money to
buy
yourself some towels.)

LOO-VER DAM

Product:
HighDro Power

How It Works:
Developed by a British graduate student named Tom Broadbent, HighDro Power is a small turbine that can be installed in the vertical drainpipes of high-rise buildings, which connect plumbing fixtures to the sewer system below. Every time a toilet is flushed or a sink is emptied, wastewater going through the drainpipe turns the blades on the turbine. The turbine is connected to a generator, which converts this mechanical energy into electricity. Broadbent estimates that a seven-story building fitted with the devices would cut its electricity bill by $1,400 a year, and that a big hotel could even make money by selling the energy back to the power company.

RECYCLED CONTENT

Product:
Reusable Toilet Wipes

How They Work:
Not all toilet tech has to be high-tech.

Biggest draw at the Harlekin Toilet Museum of Modern Arse in Wiesbaden, Germany: a WWII-era British urinal with Adolf Hitler’s face painted inside the bowl.

Sometimes it’s nice to get back to basics...and sometimes it isn’t. Wallypop, a company whose goal is “supporting a natural lifestyle,” sells flannel and terrycloth toilet wipes for people who feel guilty about using toilet paper. The Wallypop website offers tips on how to incorporate the reusable wipes into daily life. After use, it says, “Shake, scrape, swish, or squirt off anything you don’t want in your laundry, then toss the wipe into a diaper pail or container.” Then, “in laundering poop-stained cloth, an important tip: wash them separately from other laundry.” Check! And finally, “This is not nearly as gross as you might be imagining.” (Yes, it is!)

NO ESCAPE

Product:
“Billboard Mirrors”

How They Work:
Installed over restroom sinks, these 40-inch mirrorized video screens display advertising—high-definition video clips or still images—when no one is using the sink. Then, when someone approaches the sink, the ad shrinks until it occupies just a corner of the screen, enabling the person to use the mirror and, if they want, watch the commercial in the corner. TV ads in restrooms may seem like an unwelcome intrusion into one of the last places where a person can have a moment to themselves, but Clear Channel Airports, the company that introduced them at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport in early 2011, says feedback from the public and from advertisers has been positive. Don’t expect to see TV screens in toilet stalls anytime soon, though. The mirrors are intentionally installed only at the sinks to get “as far away as possible from the toilet and the negative connotations associated with that from the advertiser’s point of view.”

THE SHOOTIST

Product:
The Sega Toylet

How It Works:
Why wasn’t
this
game system called the Wii? The Toylet is the latest attempt to turn a urinal into a video game. In early 2011, Sega installed these game consoles in a few public restrooms in Tokyo. A pressure sensor is installed inside the urinal; a video display is installed at eye level above it. “Players” aim for the sensor as they make use of the facilities. There are four games to choose from: “Manneken Pis,” which calculates the volume of urine released from the time spent urinating and the pressure generated; “Graffiti Eraser,” in which you use a virtual fire hose to spray graffiti off a wall; “The Northern Wind and Her,” in which you try to generate enough pressure (wind) to lift a girl’s skirt, revealing her underwear; and “Milk from Nose,” in which you try to generate more pressure than the last person who used the urinal. When the games are over, the video screen plays an advertisement. The Toylets are experimental; Sega says it has “no concrete plans to turn them into actual products.”

STOP AND GO

Product:
The “Don’t Flush Me” project

How It Works:
When New York City’s sewer system is deluged with rainwater during heavy storms, millions of gallons of untreated sewage can end up flowing into New York Harbor. The Don’t Flush Me Project, created by a graduate student named Leif Percifield, uses a sensor connected to a cell phone to keep track of water levels in the sewer system. When the levels rise close to the point of overflowing, the cell phone calls a computer, which alerts subscribers via text messages and Twitter tweets to hold off flushing toilets until the crisis has passed. Percifield hopes to one day install them throughout the city’s sewer system.

GOING CLUBBING

Product:
The UroClub

How It Works:
Disguised as a golf club, this personal urinal allows golfers who suffer from “urinary frequency” to pee while out on the course. Developed by a urologist named Dr. Floyd Seskin, the faux 7-iron has a hollow shaft that can hold up to half a liter of urine—about twice the capacity of a human bladder. When nature calls, just unscrew the triple-sealed, leakproof cap at the top of the shaft and relieve yourself into the UroClub. Bonus: The club comes with “a removable golf towel clipped to the shaft that functions like a privacy shield!” Attach the towel to your belt or waistband and you’re ready for action. Some golfers actually credit the UroClub with improving their game: “I used to hit my ball directly into the woods so I could urinate,” one fan told Dr. Seskin. “You took five strokes off my game.”

Only US town where mail arrives by mule: Supai, AZ (at the floor of the Grand Canyon).

GEOGRAPHIC
ODDITIES Q&A

Here’s some obscure trivia about the world around us that you didn’t learn (or maybe forgot) in geography class
.

C
HINESE CHESS
Question:
What is Formosa?
Answer:
It’s a small island off the coast of China, more commonly known as Taiwan. (A Portuguese sea captain sighted it in 1554 and called it
Ilha Formosa
, meaning “beautiful island.”) The nation that governs the island is also commonly referred to as Taiwan, but its official name is the Republic of China. This is not to be confused with the
People’s
Republic of China. That’s
mainland
China—with which Taiwan/the Republic of China is locked in an ongoing dispute over who really owns the island, and who is the real China. Mainland China
was
the Republic of China from 1912 until 1949, when the Communist party won the Chinese Civil War, and the government of the Republic of China fled to Taiwan. Today the Taiwanese government still claims that mainland China is part of the ROC, and the Communist PRC government claims that Taiwan is part of mainland China. The United Nations gave its “China” seat to the Communist PRC in 1971, making it the de facto “Real China” and relegating ROC/Taiwan to a small independent nation that has diplomatic relations with only 23 other countries.

SORRY, FINLAND

Question:
What is Scandinavia?

Answer:
It’s a region in northern Europe. The name is usually used to describe the area encompassing Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. Technically, however, Finland is not part of Scandinavia because Scandinavia is the landmass of the Scandinavian Peninsula, comprising Norway and Sweden. Finland is attached to mainland Europe, and historically and culturally has more in common with its Russian neighbors than its Scandinavian neighbors. Denmark
is
included because true Scandinavia is the ancestral home of the people who founded Denmark, and because Denmark once controlled the Scandinavian Peninsula.

Record for most balloon animals made in one hour: 747, or about 1 every 5 seconds.

ON THE OUTSIDE LOOKING IN

Question:
What is Kaliningrad?

Answer:
Nestled in between Lithuania and the Baltic Sea is a 5,080-square-mile swath of land that, on most maps, is probably unlabeled and colored the same shade as Russia. This is Kaliningrad, an
exclave oblast
. That means it’s a non-connected (exclave, the opposite of an enclave) district (oblast) of another country, in this case Russia. It’s fully run by the Russian government, even though it isn’t directly connected by land. It used to be...sort of. Before the Soviet Union fell in 1991, mutual neighbor Lithuania was a Soviet republic. But Lithuania became an independent nation, while Kaliningrad, which was a Russian district rather than a Soviet republic, remained in Russian hands.