Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (67 page)

•
Petits Chevaux
was a French copy of Parcheesi, but with a horse-racing motif.

•
Aggravation.
Released in 1962 and now sold by Parker Brothers, Aggravation differs from Parcheesi in that the board’s cross-shaped playing area was redesigned into an asterisk shape, meaning as many as six people can play. And instead of plastic pawns, players use marbles. The name comes from the fact that it’s very aggravating when an opponent lands on your marble and sends you back to Start...again.

•
Wa Hoo.
This 1960s variation mistook the game’s Indian origin as
American
Indian, hence the pictures of teepees and warriors all over the board.

SHELL GAME

If you want to play Parcheesi like the ancient Indians played pachisi, put the dice away and get six cowrie shells (available at any craft store). The rules: If your roll of the shells yields two to six openings facing upward, you move that many spaces. However, if your roll yields only one opening on top, you move 10, and if you roll no openings on top, you move 25. (Not coincidentally,
pachisi
means “25” in the Hindi language.) Or, if you
really
want to play the way the Indian noblemen did, get rid of the plastic pawns and get yourself a harem.

Oldest U.S. vice president: Truman’s running mate Alben Barkley—71 when he took office.

HERE COMES THE JUDGE

It’s their courtroom, and court is in session. The ruling: They can do whatever they want. Anything at all
.

A
RE WE BORING YOU?
At a 2009 sentencing hearing, Judge Daniel Rozak sentenced Jayson Mayfield of Joliet, Illinois, to two years’ probation for a felony drug charge. In other words, he basically got to walk away. His cousin didn’t. After the sentence was announced, Mayfield’s cousin, Clifton Williams, yawned loudly, angering Rozak, who then sentenced Williams to six months in jail for contempt of court, calling the yawn a “loud and boisterous” attempt at disruption. It wasn’t the first time Rozak issued an odd contempt-of-court charge. He’s also jailed people for their ringing cell phones and for uttering profanities. (Williams, by the way, only served three weeks for his infraction.)

MAKE SURE TO TAPE IT

Facing trial for his alleged role in a Canton, Ohio, Walmart robbery in 2010, Harry Brown became concerned that his courtappointed defense lawyer was unprepared and incompetent. So Brown began to shout out corrections and facts that he felt the lawyer was getting wrong. That upset Municipal Court Judge Stephen Belden, who warned Brown against further outbursts. Brown didn’t stop, so Belden ordered a deputy to shut him up...by putting duct tape over his mouth. That got Brown even angrier, so Judge Belden ultimately dismissed the hearing to another court. Brown says putting tape on his mouth was “disrespectful.”

PHONING IT IN

Aftab Ahmed was due in court in Suffolk, England, for sentencing on a charge relating to his bankruptcy, but he was late—he was stuck in a traffic jam and not going anywhere. So he called his lawyer, Kevin McCarthy, to explain the situation. McCarthy relayed the story to Judge Caroline Ludlow, who decided to continue with the case anyway because she had a full slate that day and couldn’t afford to wait any longer. And just like that, Judge
Ludlow called Ahmed back and sentenced him—on his cell phone—to 140 hours of community service and a £750 fine.

Most states won in a presidential election: 49, by Richard Nixon (’72) & Ronald Reagan (’84).

WORK FASTER!

At your job, if you didn’t finish an important assignment on time, at the very worst, you’d probably get fired. Be glad you don’t work for Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Circuit Court Judge Charles Greene. He gave his court reporter, Ann Margaret Smith, several months to type up a 1,500-page manuscript of a criminal trial that was needed for an appeal hearing. The deadline came and went, and Smith had completed only 400 pages of it. Judge Greene felt that this constituted obstruction of justice, so he had Smith jailed for contempt of court...because she didn’t finish typing up the transcript. The Judge threatened to
keep
Smith in jail until she finished the job, but when she argued that there were no facilities in the Fort Lauderdale jail to do that, he released her to house arrest until she finally finished.

NIAGARA FAILS

Judge Robert Restaino was hearing a docket of domestic violence cases in Niagara Falls, New York, in 2005 when a cell phone rang—a posted no-no in the courtroom. Restaino said, “Every single person in this courtroom is going to jail unless I get that instrument now.” But none of the 46 people present would admit to having the phone, so Restaino followed through on his threat: He directed police to take the entire crowd of defendants, witnessess, and observers to the Niagara City Jail. Thirty-two people posted bail and were released, while the other 14 were booked and jailed. After the local media found out about his rash decision, Restaino released the remaining prisoners and blamed his behavior on “stress.” Then the city of Niagara Falls gave Restaino time to relax...by removing him from his judge position.

“A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works.”

—
Bill Vaughan

Studies show: Your favorite foods are likely foods your mother ate when you were in her womb.

HELEN KELLER:
VAUDEVILLE STAR

In 1919 Helen Keller was 39 years old and an international celebrity, but she was having trouble paying the bills. So she took her act on the road
.

W
HO WAS HELEN KELLER?
Born in Alabama in 1880, Helen Keller was a cheerful, bright baby who was just beginning to learn to talk. Then, at 19 months old, she contracted a high fever that left her blind, deaf, and unable to speak. All of a sudden, Helen’s normal development stopped and she became a “wild child”—she ate with her hands, threw food, and broke things. The Kellers’ relatives urged her affluent parents to send the little girl to an asylum, which was a too-common destination for deaf-blind people in those days. But Mrs. Keller knew that inside her angry daughter was an intelligent girl trying desperately to communicate.

So when Helen was six years old, her parents brought her to the famous inventor Alexander Graham Bell, who was trying to find a way to cure deafness. Bell was unable to help Helen but recommended the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston. The school’s headmaster decided that Helen needed constant home care and sent a 20-year-old teacher named Anne Sullivan, a recent graduate of the school, who was herself partially blind. Sullivan had no experience with deaf-blind students, but after a rough start, she had a major breakthrough when she got Helen to understand the connection between actual water and the letters “w-a-t-e-r,” which Sullivan spelled using sign language in Helen’s hands.

AN UNLIKELY CELEBRITY

After that, a whole new world opened up for Keller. Under Sullivan’s tutelage, she excelled at reading and writing, and in 1904 she became the first deaf-blind person in history to graduate from college. Keller had been famous since childhood thanks to a series of articles written about her by the headmaster at Perkins, but her celebrity skyrocketed after her first book,
The Story of My Life
, was
published when she was 22 years old. Keller then became an advocate for the deaf-blind, as well as a political activist—touting socialism, worker’s rights, and pacifism. But she was most famous for simply being Helen Keller.

Of all the animal milk that humans drink, a donkey’s milk is the closest to human milk.

OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS

Starting in Keller’s teenage years, vaudeville promoters came calling. At Sullivan’s urging, Keller always politely declined, explaining that she made her living by writing books and giving formal lectures—not by appearing in front of rowdy crowds who paid a nickel each to gawk at (and heckle) jugglers, comedians, and singers, not to mention “freak” acts such as the dog-faced boy or the Siamese twins. Even though vaudeville shows were advertised as “family entertainment,” audiences could get out of hand.

But in 1919 Keller convinced Sullivan to let her take the job. The pros just outweighed the cons. For one, Keller’s two previous books hadn’t sold well, and the money she was making on the Chautauqua adult-education lecture circuit wasn’t enough to sustain her. And because they had to travel to a new town for each lecture, the daily schedule was becoming too hectic for Sullivan, whose eyesight and health were growing worse. Doing vaudeville shows would allow them to stay in the same town for a week at a time, rather than traveling nearly every day.

Another factor that led Keller to vaudeville: She disapproved of the way Hollywood had told her story in a 1919 silent movie based on her life called
Deliverance
, in which she and Sullivan appeared as themselves at the end. The film glossed over a lot of details about her life, and completely avoided her political views. Vaudeville would give Keller a chance to set the record straight.

And finally, Keller was a people person, and she knew that vaudeville would be a great way to educate the masses about the struggles of the disabled. So against her family’s wishes, she signed on to the Orpheum vaudeville circuit.

NATURAL-BORN KELLERS

Keller knew that her decision to become a vaudeville performer was risky. How would the crowds treat her—like a freak, or as a respected speaker? There were, in essence, two Helen Kellers. “The sweet myth, the canonical one, portrays her as an angel
upon earth, saved from the savagery of darkness and silence,” wrote Keller biographer Walter Kendrick. But the real Keller was not so angelic—she was a fiery, middle-aged woman who espoused radical left-wing ideals and spoke out against the United States’ involvement in World War I, which most Americans supported. With vaudeville, Keller’s ambitious goal was to put on an entertaining, educational act without compromising her ideals.

Amazon ants are incapable of feeding themselves and need captured slave workers to survive.

The public, in turn, wanted to see for themselves whether Keller could actually do all the things for which she was credited. Because deaf-blind people were often institutionalized, most people assumed they were “retarded.” Indeed, rumors had persisted for years that Keller was not the writer she was made out to be, that she didn’t really master five languages, and that her books were ghostwritten frauds. Furthermore, her critics charged, Keller was incapable of having sophisticated political opinions—Sullivan and her husband, John Macy, were using Keller to espouse
their
Marxist views. Keller was ready to prove that she did her own thinking.

The first shows were scheduled for early 1920 at the Palace Theater in New York City, one of vaudeville’s premier venues. The playbill advertised:

Blind, deaf, and formerly DUMB, Helen Keller presents a remarkable portrayal of the triumph of her life over the greatest obstacles that ever confronted a human being!

HELEN BACK AGAIN

Billed as “The Star of Happiness,” the 20-minute act began with the curtain rising to reveal Sullivan sitting in a drawing room. As Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song” played, Sullivan spent the first few minutes chronicling Keller’s rise from a sightless, soundless childhood to a prosperous adulthood (basically the same story later made famous by William Gibson’s 1959 play
The Miracle Worker
). Then Sullivan led Keller onto the stage. Keller sat at a piano and exclaimed loudly, “It is very beautiful!” For the audience, this was a surprise. Despite what the poster said, Keller was rumored to be mute. But Keller proved that she could indeed talk, albeit very poorly—only her inner circle could understand what she said, so Sullivan was always there to translate. Said one audience member after hearing Keller recite the Lord’s Prayer: “Her voice was the loneliest sound in the world.”

Laptops are 30% more likely to fail than desktop computers.

But the performances were by no means somber affairs. Keller smiled throughout as Sullivan told stories about her, including one about her lifelong friendship with Samuel Clemens, who once said after a meeting with Keller, “Blindness is an exciting business. If you don’t believe it, get up some dark night on the wrong side of your bed when the house is on fire and try to find the door.” The crowd laughed at the jokes, and watched intently as Keller demonstrated how she could “hear” a human voice: She placed her hand on Sullivan’s face—the first finger resting on the mouth, the second finger beside the bridge of the nose, and the thumb resting on the throat. Keller could then feel the vibrations created by the voice and understand Sullivan’s words.