Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (69 page)

Artist:
The Who

Album:
The Who Sell Out

Story:
In 1967 the Who were preparing their first album for Track Records, a new label founded by the band’s managers. They had complete creative freedom, and guitarist Pete Townshend, the band’s primary songwriter, decided they’d do a concept album about the increasing commercialization of rock music. Between the songs were real jingles recorded by a real jingle-recording company for real products, implying that the band had “sold out.” The Who wanted the sleeve to look like the band had sold out as well, so graphic designers David King and Roger Law came up with an idea for four panels, each depicting one of the four members in an advertisement for one the products mentioned in the album’s jingles. Rock photographer David Montgomery shot the four scenes: On the front, Townshend applies a giant stick of Odorono deodorant to his underarm, and singer Roger Daltrey sits in a bathtub full of Heinz baked beans. On the back, drummer Keith Moon uses a giant tube of Medac pimple cream, and bassist John Entwistle wears a leopard-skin Tarzan suit and stands next to a bikini-clad woman in a parody of Charles Atlas bodybuilding product ads. While the cover helped propel the album to the Top 20 in both the U.S. and Britain, the band was sued by makers of the real products for copyright infringement. The disputes were settled, but Medac had to be changed to Clearasil for the album’s release in Australia. (Another problem: The beans that Daltrey sat in arrived in two giant, frozen cans, and he claimed to have caught a mild case of pneumonia.)

Granola bars, instant noodle soup, and freeze-dried coffee were all created for the military.

TIME FOR TANGRAMS

Here’s the story behind one of the most popular puzzles in the world: the simple, and yet maddeningly complicated, seven-piece
tangram.

S
QUARE DEAL
A few years ago, a friend introduced Uncle John to a puzzle called a tangram. It looked simple enough, consisting of only seven pieces, or “tans”: five right triangles (two large, one medium, and two small), a small square, and a four-sided parallelogram. The seven pieces fit together to make one large square, like this:

Included with the puzzle were a few dozen problems—silhouetted shapes that could be made by arranging the seven pieces in different combinations. The silhouette on the left, for example, is made by arranging the seven pieces as shown:

First female federal judge: Burnita Shelton Matthews, appointed by Harry Truman (1949).

Here’s another problem and its solution:

The rules for tangram problems are pretty simple: Each silhouetted shape uses all seven pieces. Each piece touches at least one other piece, to make a single contiguous shape. The pieces do not overlap. That’s it.

A DIM HISTORY

The early history of tangrams is pretty sketchy; they are believed to have been invented in China sometime around 1800 by a writer known only by his pen name:
Yang-cho-chü-shi
, or “Dimwitted Recluse,” who called the puzzle
Ch’i ch’iao t’u
, or “Pictures Using Seven Clever Pieces.” No copies of this book have survived; very little else is known about Dim-witted Recluse.

Mr. Recluse is believed to have been inspired by furniture from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), known as “butterfly-wing” tables. A butterfly wing table was a set of 13 smaller tables that, like tangrams, could be arranged in countless ways to symbolize different objects: flowers, dragons, mountains, boats, and, of course, butterflies.

TO THE FOUR CORNERS

By 1815 merchant ships visiting Chinese ports of call began to bring tangram puzzle books to the rest of the world. Because the books were composed almost entirely of the silhouette images and their solutions, they were easy to translate into other languages. The puzzle pieces were cheap and easy to make; people could even cut them out of pieces of paper. All that—and the novelty of the puzzles—helped spark a tangram craze that swept Europe and the
United States. In France tangrams became so popular that cartoonists began to lampoon them; one cartoon from the time shows a wife ignoring her husband and baby as she sits at a table puzzling over a tangram. Napoleon had a tangram set. So did Edgar Allan Poe. Lewis Carroll, author of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
, also wrote puzzle books, some of which included tangrams.

In the last 150 years, the magnetic North Pole has “wandered” a total of about 685 miles.

SQUARE ROOTS

Historians think there might have been another inspiration for the invention of tangrams: the fact that you can arrange all the tans in a single tangram set into either one large square, or two smaller squares of equal size. Do you remember the Pythagorean theorem from your high-school math class? (Neither did we—we had to look it up.) Here’s a quick refresher: In the case of a
right triangle
(one with a 90° angle), the square of the length of the
hypotenuse
(the side opposite the right angle), is equal to the sum of the squares of the two other sides. Put more simply, the area of the big square below is equal to the area of the two smaller squares combined:

The area of the large square, c
²
, is equal to the area of the two smaller squares combined: a
²
+ b
²
.

The first American cattle ranch was started on Long Island in 1747.

One technique for proving the theorem is to see if you can cut the larger square into pieces that can be made into the two smaller squares. If it’s possible, then the theorem is true.

Because the pieces of a tangram do just that, it’s possible that they were originally used as tools to demonstrate the concept of the Pythagorean theorem. Only later, when arranging the pieces into other shapes proved to be more fun than math class, did they become more popular as puzzles. We can’t know for sure, since no copies of Dim-witted Recluse’s first tangram book survive. But the oldest tangram books that do survive, and which date back to 1813, mention the Pythagorean theorem.

GET IN SHAPE

See if you can solve the following tangram problems. Trace the pieces on page 415 onto a piece of paper and cut them out. The answers are on
page 542
.

Iceland has more tractors per acre of cropland than any other nation.

WORD ORIGINS

Ever wonder where common words come from? Here are some everyday words and their interesting origins
.

B
UFF
Meaning:
Someone who pursues an interest as a pastime
Origin:
“In New York, in the burgeoning days of firefighting (early 1800s), men followed fire engines to watch firefighters extinguish blazes. During the icy winters, they wore buffalo fur to keep warm. The firefighters viewed spectators with contempt and nicknamed them ‘buffalos,’ which was shortened to ‘buffs.’” (From
March Hares and Monkeys’ Uncles
, by Harry Oliver)

EGGHEAD

Meaning:
A term of derision applied to intellectuals

Origin:
“First used to describe Adlai Stevenson during the 1952 Presidential campaign, the term echoes the popular misconception that intellectuals have high brows and heads shaped like eggs, the kind of heads cartoonists give to ‘superior beings’ from outer space.” (From
QPB Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins
, by Robert Hendrickson)

CYNIC

Meaning:
One who sees the worst in other people and in life

Origin:
“First used by the followers of the Greek philosopher Antisthenes (440 B.C.), a student of Socrates who scorned the pursuit of wealth and fame. It came from the name of his school,
Cynosarges
(‘white dog’). His students were
kynikos
(‘doglike’) because they ignored public customs.” (From
The Story Behind the Word
, by Morton S. Freeman)

FOOL

Meaning:
A person who acts unwisely

Origin:
“It seems no woman can really be a fool, since the word comes from the Latin
follis
, which means bellows, wind-bag, or scrotum.” (From
In a Word
, by Margaret S. Ernst)

Nation with the most McDonald’s restaurants per capita: the United States. #2: New Zealand.

GEEK

Meaning:
A socially inept person

Origin:
“From the Scottish word
geck
(fool), for a long time geek referred solely to a performer whose act consisted of biting the head off a live chicken.” (From
An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology
, by Anatoly Liberman)