Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (42 page)

Outcome:
After he recovered, Rogozov wrote, “At the worst moment of removing the appendix I flagged: My heart seized up and noticeably slowed; my hands felt like rubber. Well, I thought, it’s going to end badly.” Two weeks later, he was back at work. He spent the next year and a half at the station, and in 1962 returned to his home in Leningrad a national hero.

Working double-time: The tomato is Arkansas’ state vegetable
and
its state fruit.

VIDEO GAMES
VS. REALITY

Online multi-player immersive video games can be fun, but for some gamers, the fun gets a little out of hand
.

O
UT OF ORDER
Video and computer games are hugely popular in South Korea, where it’s estimated that a third of the country’s 50 million people regularly play MMORPGs (“massively multiplayer online role-playing games”), such as
World of Warcraft
,
Maplestory
, and especially the space-war-themed
Star Craft
. It has become the country’s most popular televised “sport,” earning the best players lucrative sponsorship deals and prompting many South Korean kids to shun school in search of a payday. The vast majority don’t hit it big, of course, and end up with an unhealthy obsession instead. Local media reported that one teenager played
Star Craft
for 36 hours straight before passing out from exhaustion. “After I woke up, I spent another 30 hours playing again,” he said.

YOU CAN RUN BUT YOU CAN’T HIDE

By December 2009, Alfred Hightower thought he was home free. The fugitive, who was wanted in Indiana on drug-dealing charges, had fled to Canada three years earlier. But Hightower’s other hobby—playing
World of Warcraft
—allowed authorities to use tips they collected from the game to track down him down online. And sure enough, there he was. Then they subpoenaed
Warcraft
’s publisher, Blizzard Entertainment, for Hightower’s IP address, screen name, account history, and billing address. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested in Ottawa, Ontario, and extradited back to the United States. Game over!

TIME BANDIT

In 2005 a 28-year-old man collapsed and died in an Internet café in Taegu, South Korea. He’d been playing
World of Warcraft
...for 50 hours straight. “We presume the cause of death was heart failure stemming from exhaustion,” police told reporters. They also noted that the man had recently been fired from his job—for missing too much work because he was playing video games.

Nothing left to the imagination: The German word for mucus is
Nasenschleim
(“nose slime”).

VIRTUAL REALTY

Entropia Universe
is an online game in which players develop real estate on a habitable asteroid called Planet Calypso. But to participate in the game, players have to spend real money to buy virtual property, virtual homes, and virtual goods. Despite the fact that they’re trading real cash for imaginary things, some people have made a lot of money at it. A resort developer named Jon Jacobs put $100,000 into his
Entropia
account in 2005, and in 2010 he sold his properties in the game to other players for a very real $635,000. Another
Entropia
player—known only as “Buzz ‘Erik’ Lightyear”—paid 3.3 million “Project Entropia Dollars” for one of the game’s top pieces of property: a space station. Each PED costs 10 cents, which means Lightyear paid $330,000 for his virtual space station (although he’s confident he’ll earn it back eventually). Altogether, economists estimate that online gamers spent $7 billion on in-game products in 2010.

NO CHEATING!

In the online world of
Second Life
, players set up identities and live fairly normal “lives”—buying houses, going on trips, working jobs, and getting married. A rising “career” in
Second Life
: virtual private detective. Online game monitors report an increase in the past few years of virtual detectives hired by gamers’ real-life spouses spying on virtual players to find out if they’re having affairs, either in the game or in real life.

Top 5 Biggest Beer-Selling Holidays in the U.S.

1. Independence Day

2. Labor Day

3. Memorial Day

4. Father’s Day

5. Christmas

First documented user of cloth handkerchiefs: England’s King Richard II (1367–1400).

UNCLE JOHN’S “CREATIVE
TEACHING” AWARDS

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

S
ubject:
Citizenship
Winner:
Natalie Munroe, 30, an 11th-grade English teacher at Central Bucks High School East in Pennsylvania

Approach:
In August 2009, Munroe began writing an online blog for family and friends. She talked about her students, describing them as “rat-like,” “dunderheads,” “frightfully dim,” and “utterly loathsome in all imaginable ways,” to list but a few of her nasty comments. The blog was supposed to be secret—Munroe never mentioned either her school or her students by name. But she did write under the not-very-secret pseudonym of “Natalie M.”

What Happened:
One of the rat-like dunderheads stumbled across the blog in February 2011, realized that “Natalie M” was Munroe, and shared the blog entries with other kids via Facebook. Word soon spread to school administrators, who promptly fired Munroe. “I’m not sorry. I don’t take back anything I said,” Munroe told reporters after she was let go.

Subject:
Anatomy

Winner:
Faith Kramer, a health and physical education teacher at New York City’s Intermediate School 72

Approach:
When she taught the state-mandated course on H.I.V./AIDS prevention to her eighth-graders in 2007, Kramer followed the state’s instructions that she speak to the kids using “terms that they understood.” She wrote “polite” words for various body parts and sexual acts on the blackboard, and then asked the students if they knew any other terms to describe those things. Then she wrote their answers on the board—and although she didn’t ask the kids to take notes, some did. When the parents of the note-takers found lists of words like “hooters,” “banana,” “junk,” and “taco” in their kids’ homework, they complained to school officials. Kramer was suspended and investigated for violating a regulation against the “verbal abuse” of students.

The official language of Mexico is Spanish, but 62 other languages are also spoken there.

What Happened:
No disciplinary charges were ever brought against Kramer. After being suspended for eight months with pay, she was allowed to return to her classroom. (She’s suing the Board of Education for $2 million.)

Subject:
Modern Dance

Winner:
Adeil Ahmed and Chrystie Fitchner, teachers at Churchill High School in Winnipeg, Manitoba

Approach:
At a school pep rally in February 2010, the pair performed a dance routine to Michael Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel.” The song must have made them feel good, because their routine included a lap dance, followed by a simulated sex act.

What Happened:
In an era when cell phones didn’t have cameras, they might have gotten off with a suspension or a written reprimand. But video clips of the incident were posted on YouTube within hours, and when those clips received more than two million hits by the end of the week, Ahmed and Fitchner were told to take their dirty dancing elsewhere.

Subject:
Peace and Conflict Studies

Winner:
Mike Richards, the head teacher at St. Mary’s Roman Catholic School in northwestern England

Approach:
In 2011 Richards wanted to give his primary school students a sense of what it was like to live through World War II, so he called an assembly of the entire school and told the children that World War III had broken out that morning. He showed them wartime film footage of the bombing of London, and told them it had been taken earlier in the day. Then an air raid siren sounded and the students were led into the cellar while fireworks were set off in the schoolyard outside to simulate bombs.

What Happened:
The “exercise” was supposed to last all day, but Richards called it off at 1:30 when the children became too terrified for him to continue. “We spent all afternoon explaining to the kids that it wasn’t real,” he said afterward. “On this occasion we realize that we went too far.” (Parents were not amused. “No one with an ounce of common sense would put children through that,” one angry mother told the
Daily Mail
newspaper.)

Anteaters, armadillos, bats, and platypuses are the only land mammals that don’t get lice.

EDUCATIONAL TOYS

What kind of person would think you can learn and have fun at the same time? (Uh-oh—don’t tell Uncle John we said that.)

S
PEAK & SPELL
One of the earliest handheld electronic toys ever available, the Speak & Spell was introduced in 1978 by Texas Instruments, primarily a manufacturer of calculators. The candy-red toy with a kid-friendly handle on top would speak letters in a robotic voice as the child typed them out, helping the child recognize the letters and learn to read. It featured a small digital display screen, a speech synthesizer, and a standard QWERTY keyboard, so it also taught kids to type. It was part of a line that also included the Speak & Read and Speak & Math, which weren’t as successful. The product got a major boost when E.T. used one to communicate with his Earth friends in
E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial
(1982), helping to fuel sales of more than 10 million Speak & Spells (in seven different languages) by 1992, when the toy was discontinued.

STACKING RINGS

Cornelius Holgate started a small family carpentry business outside Philadelphia in 1789. It thrived over the years, but in 1929, the Holgates finally found their niche: wooden toys. Child psychologist Lawrence Frank married into the Holgate family and convinced them to take the business that way. The most popular item: stacking rings—smooth, painted wooden rings that toddlers placed over a small wooden pole in order to learn motor skills. Stacking rings are still manufactured in wood by the Holgate Toy Company, as well as in plastic by Playskool and Fisher-Price, who introduced the popular Rock-a-Stack version in 1960.

SEE ’N SAY

“The cow says...
mooooo
” is probably familiar if you had kids or were a kid in the last few decades. The See ’n Say was introduced by Mattel in 1965. Here’s how it works: There’s a spinning arrow in the middle of the round toy. The child points the arrow at a picture of an animal, then pulls the “chatty ring” (it’s now a lever) and a voice pronounces the name of the animal, followed by the noise it makes. See ’n Say is unique in that it operates mechanically, without batteries. A metal needle inside the toy plays tracks on a plastic disc, functioning much like an old fashioned gramophone record. Mattel engineers were inspired by the company’s popular 1950s toy Chatty Cathy, a doll that said different phrases at random. The See ’n Say was the first toy in which kids could choose exactly what would be heard.

If airline flights had the same rate of failure as space flights, 275 planes would crash every day.

LEAPFROG

San Francisco lawyer Michael Wood’s young son, Matthew, was having trouble putting sounds together to make words. So, with the help of Stanford professor Robert Calfee (and using the technology for talking greeting cards), he developed Phonics Desk, an interactive toy designed to teach children how to pronounce words. It came out in 1995, and LeapFrog Enterprises was founded. In 1999 the company introduced LeapPad interactive books, which allow children to touch letters with a stylus in order to hear them pronounced. By 2002 almost nine million LeapPads were sold, making it the first educational toy to become a bestseller in the United States since the 1980s.

ALPHABET BLOCKS

Wooden blocks were first suggested as an educational tool in 1693, when English philosopher John Locke wrote that “dice and playthings with the letters on them to teach children the alphabet by playing” would help make learning more enjoyable. But it wasn’t until the early 1800s that such toys became widely available. That’s when New York teacher J.E. Wickham began selling sets of blocks covered in colored paper engraved with words and pictures. In 1820 the S.L. Hill Company of Williamsburg, New York, took out a patent on wooden blocks embossed with the alphabet, commonly called “alphabet blocks.” They’re now one of only 46 toys in the National Toy Hall of Fame.