Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (39 page)

—
Jim Gaffigan

“My mom made two dishes: Take It or Leave It.”

—
Steven Wright

“I believe when life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade, and then find someone whose life has given them vodka, and have a party.”

—
Ron White

“A professor from the University of Wisconsin says he’s found a way to take the bitterness out of cheddar cheese. Now, if he can only find a way to remove the arrogance from Wheat Thins.”

—
Tina Fey

“In Maine, scientists have made a hamburger out of blueberries. It’s just like a regular hamburger, except it tastes awful.”

—
David Letterman

“Fun-sized Snickers? Who’s this fun for? Not me. I need six or seven of these babies in a row to start having fun.”

—
Jeff Garlin

“I go running when I have to. When the ice cream truck is doing sixty.”

—
Wendy Liebman

“Every cookie is a sugar cookie. A cookie without sugar is a cracker.”

—
Gary Gulman

Or did it just seem that way? Today was about 55 billionths of a second longer than yesterday.

“Fish—you have to wonder about a food that everybody agrees is great, except that sometimes it tastes like what it is.”

—
P. J. O’Rourke

“I’m the frosting on America’s cake, and tonight I’m willing to let you lick the bowl.”

—
Stephen Colbert

“I order club sandwiches all the time and I’m not even a member. I don’t know how I get away with it.”

—
Mitch Hedberg

“I’m a post-modern vegetarian; I eat meat ironically.”

—
Bill Bailey

“I bought a box of animal crackers, and it said on it, ‘Do not eat if seal is broken.’ So I opened up the box, and sure enough...”

—
Brian Kiley

“At my lemonade stand I used to give away the first glass free and charge five dollars for the second glass. The refill contained the antidote.”

—
Emo Philips

A DEATH-DEFYING MOVIE GIMMICK

The Gimmick:
In the 1961 horror film
Mr. Sardonicus
, starring Guy Rolfe, director/producer William Castle decided to let movie theater crowds determine the title character’s fate. Shortly before the final act, Castle appears on screen while ushers in the theater hand out glow-in-the-dark “Punishment Poll” ballots with a “thumbs up” symbol. Castle explained that two endings had been filmed, and asked the audience whether Sardonicus should live or die. As they hold up their cards, Castle pretends to tally them up. He says, “You have given the verdict.” Then the story resumes and Sardonicus dies.

The Truth:
Only one ending was filmed. Castle made Sardonicus so incredibly vile that audiences would have no choice but to kill him. he gouged out his manservant’s eye for disobeying him, applied leeches to his maid’s face in an “experiment,” and threatened to maim his beautiful wife if his own disfigurement was not cured. And just to make sure audiences
truly
hated the character, Castle had him feed poisonous plants to a dog.

A copper mine in the Andes has 1,500 miles of tunnels. It houses an entire town.

THE TUPPERWARE
STORY, PART II

Here’s the second installment of our story about the two people, Earl Tupper and Brownie Wise, who made Tupperware a household name. Part I of the story is on
page 44
.

T
RIFECTA
The “party plan” sales method was perfect for a product like Tupperware. Clearly, it needed to be demonstrated, and once it was, people bought it. It was great for the company, too, because the sales force Brownie Wise was building cost it almost nothing. “Tupperware ladies” weren’t company employees; they weren’t paid a salary and didn’t receive benefits. Like the Stanley team before them, they were independent salespeople who earned a percentage of their sales.

The party plan was also good for the housewives who sold Tupperware. Remember, they were part of the “Rosie the Riveter” generation—women who’d worked outside the home during World War II and never lost their taste for it. Selling Tupperware offered housewives a chance to develop business skills, make their own money, and earn recognition they seldom got from cooking, cleaning, and taking care of their kids. They could sell Tupperware part-time while they raised their families, and their careers weren’t threatening to their husbands in an era when the man was still expected to be the sole breadwinner in the family.

It was even possible to make a lot of money selling Tupper-ware. Top-performing Tupperware ladies were promoted to manage other Tupperware ladies, and if the husband of a top-performing manager was willing to quit his job and join his wife at Tupper-ware, the couple could be awarded a lucrative distributorship and transferred across the country to open up new territories.

The sun contains 99.8% of the mass in the solar system. Jupiter has most of the rest.

THE QUEEN

In 1953 a public relations firm told Earl Tupper that he should make Brownie Wise the public face of the company. Tupper, who was so reclusive that few company employees even knew what he looked like, happily obliged. In the years that followed, the Tupper-ware publicity department built Wise into an idealized Tupperware lady, giving her an Oprah Winfrey-like status with her sales force. Each year thousands of Tupperware ladies paid their own way to “Jubilee,” the annual sales conference at Tupperware Home Parties headquarters in Kissimmee, Florida. One of the biggest draws of Jubilee was a chance to meet Brownie Wise. And each year she awarded refrigerators, furs, diamond jewelry, cars, and other fabulous prizes to her top performers. But some of the most coveted prizes of all were the dresses and other outfits that Wise selected from her personal wardrobe and awarded to a very lucky few. If her slender outfits did not fit the winners, many gladly shed 20 or 30 pounds just for the honor of wearing the great lady’s clothes.

Brownie Wise didn’t invent the home party system, but she made it work like it had never worked before. And in the process she and her ever-expanding sales force helped to turn Tupperware from a product that nobody wanted into one of the most iconic brands in American business history, as well known as Kleenex, Jell-O, Xerox, Frisbee, and Band-Aid. In the process, Tupperware ladies became a 1950s cultural force in their own right.

BOWLED OVER

Meanwhile, sales of Tupperware were growing so quickly that the company was on track to become a $100 million-a-year company by 1960. Ironically, the only person who wasn’t pleased was Tupper himself. Though Wise had made him a millionaire many times over, and had served as the public face of Tupperware at his own request, Tupper grew increasingly resentful that she seemed to receive all the credit for making Tupperware the huge success that it was.

By 1957 Tupper was ready to sell his company, and in that male-dominated era he was afraid that he’d never find a buyer if the company had such a forceful and powerful woman as its second-in-command. In January 1958, he abruptly fired Wise, without notice and without a penny in severance pay, after accusing her of (among other things) using a Tupperware bowl as a dog dish. Wise later sued the company and settled for $30,000. Eight months later, Tupper sold the company. Price: $16 million.

First woman to make the cover of
Businessweek
magazine: Brownie Wise, in April 1954.

Tupper stayed on to run Tupperware for the new owners until he retired in 1973. In those years he ruthlessly purged the company of any and all record of Wise’s contribution to building the business. In many ways the purge continues to this day; as late as 2011, the Tupperware website still made no mention of Brownie Wise at all.

A WORD TO THE WISE

After she was fired from Tupperware, Wise became the president of a new home party company called Cinderella Cosmetics. She hoped to persuade her Tupperware ladies to jump ship and help her build the new company, but only a handful did—even her own mother decided to stick with Tupperware.

Cinderella Cosmetics folded after just a year in business. After that Wise dabbled in Florida real estate and pursued other interests, but she never made another big mark in the business world. When she died in 1992, still living just a few miles from Tupper-ware Home Party headquarters in Kissimmee, her passing was ignored by the company and barely noted anywhere else.

PARTY ON

Perhaps the biggest and most backhanded compliment Tupper ever paid to Brownie Wise came the day he sold the company in 1958. As he was leaving the building, he warned one of his top executives to get out while the getting was still good. “This thing is going to blow up, it’ll never last,” he told his head of manufacturing, “go out and get yourself another job.” Tupper apparently didn’t envision the company prospering long without Wise at the head of her devoted sales force, urging the ladies ever onward and upward.

He was wrong. The world has changed a lot since 1958, but Tupperware is still around; today it’s a $4.2 billion company with sales in nearly 100 countries. And though you can now buy Tupperware direct from the company’s website, you can still buy it at a Tupperware party; there are more than 2.6 million Tupper-ware ladies worldwide. Every 1.75 seconds, one of them hosts another Tupperware party somewhere in the world, using the sales techniques that Brownie Wise perfected more than a half century ago.

Tupperware parties are banned in China, where they’re seen as capitalist “pyramid schemes.”

RANDOM ORIGINS

Once again Uncle John answers the question: Where does all this stuff come from?

T
HE FLASHLIGHT
A few years after D-cell batteries were invented in 1896 came the first battery-powered hand lights. The first one—called the “Electrical Hand Torch”—was invented by American Conrad Hubert. Because early batteries were weak and the contacts faulty, the lights flashed a lot, hence the name “flashlight.” Even after the batteries and contacts were improved, the name stuck. (In the U.K., flashlights are still referred to as “torches.”)

THE 911 EMERGENCY CALL SYSTEM

The 999 emergency phone number was set up in England after a 1937 house fire killed five people. It wasn’t until 1967 that the FCC and AT&T worked together to create the system in the United States. They chose “911” because “999” took too long to dial on a rotary phone. But AT&T was taking a long time to implement the system, so Bob Gallagher, president of the Alabama Telephone Company, ordered his plant manager, Robert Fitzgerald, to set up the nation’s first 911 service in Haleyville, Alabama. By the mid-1970s, most of the U.S. could dial 911.

THE SLURPEE

Omar Knedlik had a broken soda fountain and thirsty customers. It was a hot day in 1957, so the World War II vet put some pops in the freezer at his Dairy Queen in Coffeyville, Kansas. By the time the sodas were opened, they’d turned to slush. And Knedlik’s customers
loved
them. Inspired, he started tinkering with parts from the soda fountain, an ice cream machine, and his car’s air conditioner. A few years later, the machine—which blends flavored syrup, C02, and semi-frozen ice—was complete. Knedlik called his new the drink the ICEE, and was soon selling machines all over the U.S. In 1967 the 7-Eleven corporation licensed them. A company ad man named Bob Stanford came up with the name “Slurpee,” based on how it sounds when sucked through a straw. Since then, more than six billion Slurpees have been slurped.

More good news from nature: Smallpox can live outside the human body for over a year.

THE STORY OF
METAL, PART I

Do you have a ring on your finger? Is it made from gold, silver, platinum, or another natural metal? Then ponder this: The metal in that ring on your finger is older than the planet you’re standing on
.

W
HAT IS “METAL”?
Scientifically speaking, metals are naturally occurring chemical elements that are typically hard, lustrous, and good conductors of both heat and electricity. Examples include iron, gold, silver, copper, zinc, nickel, etc., but also elements we don’t normally think of as metals. One is
sodium
—a metal we regularly eat: Sodium is a soft, silvery white metal that commonly bonds with the element
chlorine
to form sodium chloride, or common salt. Another is
astatine
, which was discovered in 1940 in a lab, where it was created artificially. It wasn’t discovered in nature until 1943. Astatine is highly radioactive, and only a single ounce of it is believed to exist—in total—on Earth. Of the 118 known chemical elements in existence, 88 of them are metals.