Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (7 page)

I Spy...
Spencer Tracy’s hat

Where to Find It:
On Henry Fonda’s head. The fishing cap that he wore in the film (his last) was a gift from co-star Katharine Hepburn. It was the first time the two legends had worked together. Spencer Tracy, who’d died in 1967, was Hepburn’s longtime lover. On the first day of filming
On Golden Pond
, Hepburn told Fonda that she wanted him to have “Spencer’s lucky hat.”

TRUE GRIT
(2010)

I Spy...
the Boston Red Sox logo

Where to Find It:
On Matt Damon’s head. He tries to work in a nod to his favorite team in all his movies. But how could he do that in a Western set 20 years before the Sox formed? In the two buckles on his cowboy hat—they form the familiar Red Sox “B.”

It takes 5 liters of water to produce 1 liter of bottled water.

ROCKY BALBOA
(2006)

I Spy...
Sylvester Stallone

Where to Find Him:
Ringside. Background footage from real boxing matches was used for the climactic fight scene. Stallone—who wrote, directed, and starred in the film—had attended one of those fights. If you look closely you can spot him watching his fictional alter-ego battle it out in the ring.

PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES
(1987)

I Spy...
the airplane from
Airplane!

Where to Find It:
In the exterior shot of the passenger jet where Steve Martin and John Candy meet. In a nod to the classic comedy film, director John Hughes used the same footage from the 1980 disaster spoof.

1408
(2007)

I Spy...
a famous axe

Where to Find It:
In a fireman’s hands. In Stephen King’s story about a malevolent hotel room, a firefighter uses an axe to break down a door. It’s the same axe used in 1980’s
The Shining
(another King story about an evil hotel), with which Jack Nicholson tried to kill his family after yelling, “Heeere’s Johnny!” (Both films were made at London’s Elstree Studios, where the axe lived in a prop closet.)

APOCALYPTO
(2006)

I Spy...
Waldo

Where to Find Him:
In a pile of corpses. Remember the
Where’s Waldo
picture-book series in which Waldo’s tiny image is hidden among hundreds of other people? For some reason, in
Apocalypto
, a bloody epic about the final days of the Mayan civilization, director Mel Gibson inserted a single frame of a real man dressed like Waldo—blue jeans, red-and-white striped shirt, and red cap. (He appeared only in the theatrical release; Gibson took him out of the DVD version.)

T-ant-T? Some species of ants explode when attacked.

FORGOTTEN FOUNDERS

Lots of cities are named after people, but sometimes who those people were gets lost to history
.

B
URBANK, CALIFORNIA
Home to many TV networks and TV studios (most famously the “beautiful downtown Burbank” where Johnny Carson made
The Tonight Show
), the former Spanish ranch land was incorporated in 1887. The town began as 4,600 acres purchased by David Burbank, a dentist from New Hampshire.

LARAMIE, WYOMING

Wyoming conjures up images of plains and cowboys, but the state’s third-largest city was named after a French-Canadian fur trapper. Jacques La Ramée settled there in 1815. In 1821 he went on a trapping expedition and disappeared. He’s believed to have been killed by the Arapaho, but evidence was never found. Nevertheless, he was such an economic influence that the village he lived in and the nearby Laramie River were named after him.

RENO, NEVADA

Jessie Reno was a war hero in both the Mexican-American War and the Civil War, where he served as a general in the Union army, and died at the Battle of South Mountain in 1862. Reno was from Virginia, but he was such a popular military figure that a number of emerging towns were named after him, including Reno, Pennsylvania; El Reno, Oklahoma; and Reno, Nevada.

SEDONA, ARIZONA

In the American West, towns were often “put on the map” when they got mail service. Postal employees settled in unnamed, unincorporated towns and helped organize governments in addition to mail service. That’s what happened in the early 20th century with Sedona, Arizona, named after Sedona Schnebly, wife of the town’s first postmaster.

Most commonly reported UFO shapes: hat-shaped, oval-shaped, and cigar-shaped.

YONKERS, NEW YORK

One of the town’s first settlers in the 17th century was Adriaen van der Donck, a landowner who in his native Netherlands was a
jonkheer
(“yonk-ear”), the Dutch equivalent of “esquire” or “lord.” In the New World, “Jonkeer” became his nickname. Yonkers is a corruption of that, and the New York City suburb was named after him.

PROVO, UTAH

Like many cities in Utah, Provo began as a Mormon settlement. They called it Fort Utah when they arrived in 1849, but a year later the town was officially incorporated and renamed Provo, after French-Canadian trapper and trader Etienne Provost, who’d helped settle the area in 1825.

MODESTO, CALIFORNIA

William Chapman Ralston founded the Bank of California and helped finance much of the settlement of Northern California in the late 1800s. He was so influential that a local government council decided to name a town after him. But at the naming ceremony for “Ralston, California,” Ralston declined the offer. One of the Spanish-speaking workers there reportedly said that Ralston was “muy modesto,” or very modest, to turn down the name. So Modesto it was.

ORLANDO, FLORIDA

Fort Gatlin was built near what is now Orlando in order to protect white settlers from the resident Seminole Indians. Skirmishes between the natives and the Europeans resulted, culminating in several conflicts known as the Seminole Wars, the first occurring in 1817. There, it’s said, a soldier named Orlando Reeves was struck down in battle, and the city is named after him. Historians now believe that story was invented to explain the mysterious carving of the name “Orlando” into a tree as a grave marker. Or maybe it was named after Orlando Rees, a sugar mill owner who had lived nearby. A third origin story: It’s named after Orlando, the lead character in William Shakespeare’s play
As You Like It
. It makes sense—in the play Orlando was in love with Rosalind, and one of the city’s main streets is Rosalind Avenue.

Was Sydney called Robinia? Melbourne, Australia, was originally named Batmania.

POLI-TALKS

When walking the halls of power, remember: Walls (and reporters) have ears
.

“No sane person in the country likes a war in Vietnam, and neither does President Johnson.”

—
Hubert Humphrey

“Sure, there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too.”

—
Richard Nixon

“Since a politician never believes what he says, he is surprised when others believe him.”

—
Charles De Gaulle

“If I were a Democrat, I suspect I’d feel a heck of a lot more comfortable in Boston than, say, America.”

—
Rep. Dick Armey

“What does an actor know about politics?”

—
Ronald Reagan, former actor, to SAG president Ed Asner

“
Machismo gracias
.”

—
Al Gore, thanking
Hispanic students at a school

“We see nothing but increasingly brighter clouds every month.”

—
Gerald Ford

“I don’t understand it. Jack will spend any amount of money to buy votes but he balks at investing a thousand dollars in a beautiful painting.”

—
Jacqueline Kennedy

“Political skill is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, and to have the ability afterward to explain why it didn’t happen.”

—
Winston Churchill

“I tried to walk a fine line between acting lawfully and testifying falsely, but I now recognize that I did not fully accomplish that goal.”

—
Bill Clinton

“This is a great day for France.”

—
Richard Nixon, at French president de Gaulle’s funeral

“I’ve been subject to quite a lot of illegal leaking.”

—
Hillary Clinton

The Iron Pillar of Delhi, made of 98% pure wrought iron, hasn’t rusted in 1,600 years.

AFTER THE FUNERAL

We all hope to rest in peace after we die, and most of us will. But an unlucky few of us...well, read on and see for yourself
.

O
LIVER CROMWELL (1599–1658)

Claim to Fame:
Puritan, Member of Parliament, and leader of the forces that won the English Civil War in the 1640s, Cromwell presided over the trial and execution of King Charles I in 1649, then ruled England until his death in 1658.

After the Funeral:
You can’t kill a king without making enemies. By 1660 Charles I’s son, Charles II, was back on the throne, and the royalists were ready for revenge. On January 30, 1661, Cromwell’s body was removed from its burial vault in Westminster Abbey, hanged in a posthumous “execution,” and decapitated. The body was then dumped in a pit; the head was impaled on a 20-foot spike and displayed for more than 20 years above Westminster Hall, the same building in which Charles I was tried and condemned to death. In 1685 the spike came down during a storm, and the weather-beaten head passed from one private collector to another for nearly three centuries. In 1960 the last owner arranged for it to be buried in a secret location at Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge, England, where it remains to this day.

What happened to the rest of Cromwell’s body? It’s either still in the pit where it was dumped in 1661, or was retrieved by Cromwell’s daughter Mary and interred in a family crypt. No one knows for sure except, perhaps, the family: For more than 300 years, Cromwell’s descendants have refused all requests to open the crypt to find out if the headless body is in there.

SIMON DE MONTFORT (1208–65)

Claim to Fame:
An English nobleman who in A.D. 1264 led a rebellion against his brother-in-law, King Henry III, and then called the first
elected
parliament in English history. Because of this he’s known as “the father of the (British) House of Commons.” Unlike Oliver Cromwell, de Montfort did not execute the King or his son, Prince Edward, after capturing them in the battle of Lewes in 1264. He lived to regret it the following year, when Edward escaped from imprisonment, raised an army, and slew de Montfort and his son Henry (named after the King) in the battle of Evesham on August 4, 1265.

Human tears have three layers: an oily layer, a liquid layer, and a mucus layer.

After the Funeral:
The dead body of Montfort was decapitated, emasculated (that’s the polite way of putting it), and otherwise cut into pieces, with the noblemen who defeated him taking the choicest parts home as souvenirs. (The first Baron Wigmore, Roger de Mortimer, got the head; he gave it to his wife, Baroness Maud, as a gift.) Afterward the parts that nobody wanted were buried beneath the altar of nearby Evesham Abbey, which soon became a popular pilgrimage site. When King Henry learned of this, he ordered de Montfort removed from the abbey and buried under a tree, the precise location of which has long been forgotten. Even the abbey is gone; it was destroyed during the reign of King Henry VIII (1491–1547). Today all that remains is a memorial stone where the altar once stood.

BENNY HILL (1924–92)

Claim to Fame:
Bawdy British comedian and host of
The Benny Hill Show
, which aired from 1951 to 1989 in 140 countries around the world.

After the Funeral:
Despite having a fortune estimated at $15 million, Hill was famously frugal. He lived simply, residing in a rented flat within walking distance of the TV studio where he taped his show. He never married and never even owned a car. So when he was found dead of a heart attack in his flat in April 1992, people couldn’t help but wonder whatever happened to all that money.

Hill kept his millions in the bank, and when he died it all passed to his closest relatives. But that didn’t stop rumors from spreading that Hill was buried with a large amount of gold jewelry, and one night in October 1992, thieves tried to dig up his body, apparently to steal the rumored jewelry. The thieves managed to dig all the way down to Hill’s coffin, but were unable to get it open before daybreak, when they had to flee. A passerby discovered the desecrated grave soon after sunup, and within hours cemetery workers filled in the hole and covered the grave with a half-ton slab of concrete. Hill has rested undisturbed ever since.

Japan’s Hanshin Expressway passes through the 5th, 6th, and 7th floors of an office building.

BEFORE YOU GO

Overcome with wanderlust? Enjoy these random facts about travel
.

• World’s two busiest international airports: Atlanta, with 36 million passengers per year, and Beijing, with 31 million.

• Country most visited by vacationers: France, with 77 million visitors annually.

• Since 2007, the U.S. has issued e-passports. They’re like regular passports but with a computer chip that enables face recognition, fingerprints, and iris scans at international borders. (Can you get yours without the chip? No.)