Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (59 page)

Some fireflies lay glowing eggs.

THE VERDICT:
Goddard’s case was dismissed when he didn’t show up at court. Winkelman later dropped his suit. Not long afterward, the station changed its format to easy listening.

THE PLAINTIFF:
Robin Brown, 48, amateur birdwatcher and employee at Massage Envy in Weston, Florida

THE DEFENDANT:
Mark Horn, assistant state attorney in Broward County, Florida

THE LAWSUIT:
One day in 2009, Brown was birdwatching in a patch of woods in Weston. As she often did, Brown said a prayer for peace and burned a small bundle of sage, a Native American purification ritual known as “smudging.” When she returned to her car, Broward County Sheriff’s Deputy Dominic Raimondi was waiting for her. Suspecting that she was smoking marijuana, he searched her bag and found the sage. Although sage and marijuana don’t look (or smell) anything alike, Raimondi put the sage into a field testing kit, which is known for giving false positives. The substance tested positive for marijuana, but Raimondi let Brown go and sent the sage to the crime lab for a proper test.

Three months passed. Brown forgot about the incident... until the police entered her workplace, arrested her on felony drug charges, handcuffed her, and marched her out in front of her customers and coworkers. At the station, Brown was strip-searched, cavity-searched, and put in jail for the night. “I tried to act tough,” she later said, “but inside I was quaking.” The next day, Brown hired a lawyer, Bill Ullman, to find out why she had been arrested. The answer: Assistant State Attorney Mark Horn was supposed to have had the sage tested; for some reason, he didn’t do it, but he ordered her arrest anyway. Ullman demanded that the substance be tested; when it finally was, it was indeed sage. The charges were dropped. Brown then filed a civil suit against Horn.

THE VERDICT:
The judge dismissed the case. “Prosecutors are given immunity from lawsuits in the course of doing their jobs,” he said. Ullman disagreed. “Horn
wasn’t
doing his job. He filed a false statement swearing she had marijuana, and she didn’t.” At last report, the case was under appeal.

If you’re anywhere in Michigan, you’re no more than 85 miles from one of the Great Lakes.

ADIDAS VS. PUMA, PART II

Here’s part two of our chronicle of one of the most bitter family squabbles in business history. Part I of the story is on
page 110
.

S
TRIPS ’N STRIPES
Now that Adi and Rudi Dassler had split their shoe company into two new ones, both men wanted to be sure that customers would be able to tell Adidas and Puma shoes apart. It had been common practice for many shoemakers, the old Dassler Brothers company included, to sew vertical strips of leather onto the sides of shoes to give them structure and strength. The strips weren’t too noticeable, because they were the same color as the rest of the shoe.

Adi Dassler decided that the strips—which were painted white or some other color to make them look like
stripes
—would be the Adidas trademark. He made up sample shoes with two, three, four, five, and six stripes apiece, then asked his wife Käthe and her sister Marianne to pick which ones they liked best. Two-stripe shoes were out: Some Dassler Brothers shoe designs had used two strips of leather, so Rudi would have grounds to fight a two-stripe trademark if he wanted to.

Käthe and Marianne felt that the shoes with four or more stripes looked too busy. They picked three stripes, and Adidas shoes have been made with them ever since. Over at Puma, Rudi played with a few designs, including a puma jumping through a capital “D,” before eventually settling on the company’s signature “formstripe,” a horizontal stripe that begins at the back of the shoe, then widens as it moves forward along the side of the shoe before turning down toward the sole.

SPLIT PERSONALITIES

When the Dassler brothers divided their company in two, the employees had to choose whether they wanted to work for Adi at Adidas, or for Rudi at Puma. Most of the technical people stayed with Adi; most of the sales force and administrators went with Rudi. That might seem like a formula for faster growth at Puma,
since Rudi’s people knew how to move the merchandise, but it wasn’t. Adi’s constant tinkering in the factory and also on the playing field, especially when the teams he supplied had really important games, proved the deciding factor. Adidas developed a reputation for superior designs that helped it grow into a major European brand. Puma was left to play catch-up. It grew too, but at a slower pace, and remained primarily a national brand with strong ties to German soccer clubs.

On average, left-handed women enter menopause 5 years sooner than right-handed women.

THE TOWN OF BENT NECKS

As the years passed and Adidas and Puma loomed ever larger over the economy of tiny Herzogenaurach, the entire town was drawn into their feud. Nearly everyone worked at one company or the other (or was related to someone who did), so few people could avoid choosing a side. Dating, even socializing, across company lines was frowned upon. Marrying someone from the other side was out of the question. Herzogenaurach became known as “the town of bent necks,” because people looked down to see which shoes people were wearing before engaging them in conversation.

Adidas people bought their bread from bakers who sided with Adidas, bought their meat from Adidas-friendly butchers, and drank in Adidas-only beer halls. Puma workers did the same. Which bus a child took to school depended on whose side their parents were on, and so did the gang a kid joined. The rivalry that started soon after birth went all the way to the cemetery: Each side had its own tombstone carvers. And when Adi and Rudi Dassler died four years apart in the 1970s, they were buried in opposite corners of the Herzogenaurach cemetery, as far apart as possible. They had carried their feud to the end of their lives, and the same was expected of everyone else.

THE ENEMY IS US

Had Adi and Rudi been able to patch up their differences in their lifetimes, and had their descendants not carried the feud into the next generation, the global athletic shoe business might look very different today. But they didn’t. The brothers couldn’t even limit themselves to fighting with each other. Adi fought with his son and heir, Horst Dassler, finally banishing him to France, where Horst was put in charge of a shoe factory that was losing money.
Horst turned it into a moneymaker, then built Adidas France into an operation that rivaled the rest of Adidas. But none of it was good enough for Adi. Writing from Herzogenaurach, Adi disowned his son in one angry letter after another.

Scientific term for insect poop:
frass
.

Horst was so certain that Adi would throw him out of the company that he began diverting millions of Adidas dollars into his own sporting-goods businesses, so that he’d have somewhere to go when he got tossed out. He concealed his activities behind shell companies and front men for several years. And though his scheming eventually was exposed, he never did get thrown out of Adidas. After Adi died in 1978, Horst battled his four sisters for control of Adidas, winning the fight in 1984 when his mother sided with him against his sisters.

THE CUB

Over at Puma, Rudi’s relationship with Armin Dassler, his oldest son and heir, was no better. Rudi routinely belittled him in front of other company executives, and Armin chafed at his father’s overbearing nature and outmoded ways of doing business. Armin could see what his cousin Horst was accomplishing at Adidas, and it drove him crazy that he couldn’t do the same at Puma. Armin finally banished
himself
to Salzburg, Austria, to run a Puma factory there. When the Austrian athletic shoe market proved less profitable than expected, Armin started selling shoes to the U.S. market, something Rudi had expressly forbidden. Armin actually had to go behind Rudi’s back to introduce his father’s own shoes to the largest sporting goods market in the world.

The relationship between father and son never did improve. When Rudi died in 1974, Armin was stunned to learn that Rudi had written him out of the will. Only a legal technicality allowed Armin to inherit a controlling 60 percent interest in Puma against his father’s dying wishes. Armin’s younger brother Gerd inherited the other 40 percent.

While the two families were consumed with their own squabbles, a shoe-nami was on the way from overseas. For Part III of the story, turn to
page 477
.

Over 8
Harry Potter
movies, actor Daniel Radcliffe went through 70 wands and 160 pairs of glasses.

NASTY MUSICIANS

Who are the harshest music critics? Other musicians
.

On Lady Gaga:
“I’m not quite sure who this person is, to be honest. I don’t know if it is a man or a woman.”

—
Christina Aguilera

On Christina Aguilera:
“She is one of the most disgusting human beings in the entire world. She looks like a drag queen.”

—
Kelly Osbourne

On the Beatles:
“They were peripheral. If you had more knowledge about music, they didn’t really mean anything.”

—
Van Morrison

On Elvis Costello:
“Music journalists like him because music journalists look like him.”

—
David Lee Roth

On Rod Stewart:
“He has kind of a female voice.”

—
Tony Bennett

On Red Hot Chili Peppers:
“I’m forever near a stereo saying, ‘What is this garbage?’ And the answer is always the Red Hot Chili Peppers.”

—
Nick Cave

On Jack White (of the White Stripes):
“He looks like Zorro on doughnuts.”

—
Noel Gallagher (Oasis)

On Chuck Berry:
“I love his work but I couldn’t warm to him even if I was cremated next to him.”

—
Keith Richards

On Keith Richards:
“It’s like a monkey with arthritis, trying to go onstage and look young.”

—
Elton John

On Mick Jagger:
“I think he would be astounded and amazed if he realized to how many people he is not a sex symbol, but a mother image.”

—
David Bowie

On former bandmate Slash:
“I consider him a cancer and better avoided.”

—
Axl Rose

On Bruce Springsteen:
“He plays four and a half sets. That’s torture. Does he hate his audience?”

—
John Lydon (Sex Pistols)

The campy
Batman
TV show was inspired by a Batman-themed party Hugh Hefner threw in 1965.

A BORING PAGE

Does everything have to be exciting?

Y
AWN
The “Boring 2010” conference took place in London. About 200 people attended. Among the activities: milk-tasting, a PowerPoint presentation of a man’s changing tastes in necktie colors, and a speech called “My Relationship with Bus Routes.”

WHATEVER

In 1964 artist Andy Warhol released what is possibly the most boring movie ever made. Called
Empire
, the grainy, black-and-white silent film is just one continuous shot of New York City’s Empire State Building on a night when nothing happened. Warhol filmed the building for six hours, but to make the movie even less interesting, he recorded it at a slower speed so it lasts eight hours.

YUP

To many, the phrase “boring museum” is redundant, but some museums are more boring than others. Examples: the Cement Museum in Spain, the Wallpaper Museum in France, and the Occupational Health and Safety Museum in Germany.

MEH

What’s the world’s most boring city? It could be Brussels, Belgium. According to a poll of 2,400 travelers conducted by the website
TripAdvisor.com
, aside from the famous waffles, there’s not much of interest there.

ARE WE DONE YET?

In 2010 British researcher William Tunstall-Pedoe designed a computer program that scanned all the news from every single day in the century to determine the most boring day of the 20th century. The “winner”: April 11, 1954. On that day, no one famous was born, no one famous died, and there were no big news events. According to Tunstall-Pedoe, even the weather was boring.

NASA slang for floating space poop: “escapees.”

THE FORBIDDEN
ISLAND, PART II

Here’s Part II of our story about what could be the most isolated people on Earth. (Part I is on
page 163
.)

S
TRANGERS BEARING GIFTS
The first real threat to the natives of North Sentinel Island appeared in 1858, when the British established a penal colony at Port Blair on nearby South Andaman Island, and set about trying to pacify the local tribes—the Great Andamanese, the Onge, the Jarawa, and eventually the Sentinelese. One technique the British used was to kidnap a member of an unfriendly tribe, hold him for a short period, treat him well, and then shower him with gifts and let him return to his people. In so doing, the British hoped to demonstrate their friendliness. If the first attempt didn’t work, they’d repeat the process with as many tribesmen as it took to turn an unfriendly tribe into a friendly one.