Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (9 page)

Judge:
Timothy Blakely, a family court judge in Minnesota’s First Judicial District Court

Background:
For a number of years Judge Blakely was in the habit of referring people who came before his court to a St. Paul attorney named Christine Stroemer for divorce mediation. There’s nothing particularly unusual about that, except that Stroemer had handled Blakely’s own divorce, and she knocked more than $60,000 off of his $108,000 legal bill after receiving the referrals. Blakely got caught when his ex-wife tipped off the state Board on Judicial Standards.

After Indonesia’s Krakatoa erupted in 1883, human skeletons floated on lava “rafts” all the way to Africa.

What Happened:
The Board recommended that Blakely be removed from the bench, but the state Supreme Court let him off with a censure and a six-month suspension without pay in 2009. That made Dakota County prosecutor Larry Clark so angry that he ran against—and defeated—Blakely in 2010, winning 57 percent of the vote. (Blakely says that he didn’t realize at the time that his conduct had created the “appearance” of a conflict of interest.)

Judge:
Carlos Garza, a New Mexico magistrate judge

Background:
After recusing himself from a 2006 drunk-driving case involving a woman he was dating, Garza told a court clerk to clear the woman’s license of the charge before she met the legal requirements for having it cleared. In another incident with the same woman, Garza tried to intimidate a deputy marshal who pulled the woman over for speeding. Garza, a passenger in the car, reportedly told the deputy, “I’ll take care of these tickets. Do you know who I am?” Garza got himself in even deeper trouble when he failed to comply with a Judicial Standards Commission order that he submit to a drug test. He eventually did take the test...and was found to have 14 times the legal limit for passive exposure to cocaine in his system. The commission also accused him of cutting the hair on his head and body to prevent samples being taken for the drug test. (Garza claims that’s not why he cut his hair.)

What Happened:
Garza ran for reelection unopposed in November 2006 and won; the next day the state Supreme Court barred him from the bench for life and ordered him to pay $16,000 to reimburse the Judicial Standards Commission for the cost of its investigation.

Update:
Garza made headlines again in April 2008 when he was arrested for failure to appear in what had once been his own court, where he was scheduled to go on trial for driving with a suspended license, failure to display registered license plates, and speeding.

YOU’RE NEVER TOO OLD...

Because age is just a number
.

At age 76:
Min Bahadur Sherchan successfully climbed Mount Everest in 2008. He’s the oldest person ever to do it.

At age 83:
Thomas Edison applied for his 1,093rd—and final—patent (1931). The invention: a holder for items being electroplated.

At age 84:
Eamon de Valera won a second term as Ireland’s president (1966), making him the oldest democratically elected head of state in history.

At age 86:
Doc Paskowitz, subject of the 2007 film
Surfwise
, still surfed every day.

At age 86:
Katherine Pelton swam the 200m butterfly in 3:01:14, beating the 85- to 89-year-old
men
’s record by more than 20 seconds (1992).

At age 87:
Mary Baker Eddy founded
The Christian Science Monitor
newspaper (1908).

At age 87:
Bob Hope entertained the troops, traveling with a USO show that went to Saudi Arabia in 1990 during Operation Desert Storm.

At age 88:
Michelangelo drew the architectural plans for Rome’s Santa Maria degli Angeli church (1563).

At age 89:
Betty White won the 2010 Screen Actors Guild award for comedy actress (
Hot in Cleveland
)...a year
after
winning SAG’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

At age 90:
Painter Marc Chagall became the first living artist to be exhibited at Paris’s Louvre museum (1977).

At age 92:
Dr. Paul Spangler of San Luis Obispo, California, ran his 14th marathon.

At age 93:
P.G. Wodehouse wrote his 96th book in 1975, the same year he was knighted.

At age 95:
A retired union organizer named Bernard Herzberg earned a Master of Arts in Refugee Studies at the University of East London (2005).

At age 102:
Alice Pollock published her memoir
Portrait of My Victorian Youth
(1971). It was her first book.

In 1978 Colorado outlawed using an apostrophe in Pike’s Peak. Now it’s “Pikes Peak.”

Q&A:
ASK THE EXPERTS

Everyone’s got a question they’d like answered—basic stuff like, “Why is the sky blue?” Here are a few questions, with answers from the world’s top trivia experts
.

O
VER PRESSURE
Q:
Why do our ears “pop” at high altitudes?

A:
“As you go upward, the air gets thinner and lighter. If you have some heavier air from a lower level trapped inside your ears you may be able to feel the difference. As you go higher, the heavy air inside your ears presses outward on the eardrums harder than the light air pushes inward. If the heavier air escapes suddenly so that the pressure becomes equal all at once, you hear a tiny ‘pop.’ This is more apt to happen coming down than going up. Swallowing helps to keep the pressure on the inside of the ears even with the pressure on the outside.” (From
Questions Children Ask
, by Edith and Ernest Bonhivert)

1 IF BY LAND, 0.868976 IF BY SEA

Q:
Why are a statute (land) mile and a nautical mile different lengths?

A:
“In 1593 Queen Elizabeth I established the statute mile as 5,280 feet (1,609 meters). It’s based on walking distance, and originated with the Romans, who designated 1,000 paces as a land mile. The nautical mile isn’t based on human locomotion, but on the circumference of the Earth. There was wide disagreement on the precise measurement, but by 1954 the United States adopted the International Nautical Mile of 1,852 meters (6,076 feet). So 1 nautical mile equals 1.1508 statute miles; and 1 statue mile equals 0.868976 nautical miles.” (From
The Handy Science Answer Book
, by the Science/Technology Dept. of the Carnegie Library Assoc.)

BOUNCING AROUND THE ROOM

Q:
Where does the force come from when you are thrown across a room after touching a live electrical connection?

A:
“It’s not the electricity itself that throws you. The force comes from your own muscles. When a large electrical current runs through your body, your muscles are stimulated to contract powerfully—much harder than they can be made to contract voluntarily. The electric current typically flows into one arm, through the abdomen, and out of one or both legs, which can cause most of the muscles in the body to contract at once. The results are unpredictable, but given the strength of the leg and back muscles, the shock can send the victim flying across the room.” (From
The Last Word: Questions & Answers
, edited by Mick O’Hare)

Technically, the “high seas” are waters 12 or more nautical miles beyond a nation’s territory.

GENDER BENDER

Q:
Why do men have lower voices than women?

A:
“In the human voice box, known as the
larynx
and located in the throat, there are strings called vocal cords. These strings give sound to the voice when vibrated by wind from the lungs. The deeper voices of men are due to the longer and thicker cords in the voice box. In boys, vocal cords keep growing until about age 13, when they become fully grown. A boy’s voice makes a sudden change when he reaches maturity because the greatest amount of growth takes place at that time. That’s when his voice ‘breaks.’” (From
How a Fly Walks Upside Down
, by Martin M. Goldwyn)

PALIN COMPARISON

Q:
Can you really see Russia from Alaska?

A:
“Yes, but only the boring parts. Russia and Alaska are divided by the Bering Strait, which is about 55 miles at its narrowest. In the middle of the Bering Strait are two small islands: Big Diomede, in Russian territory, and Little Diomede, which is part of the United States. At their closest, these islands are a little less than two and a half miles apart, which means that, on a clear day, you can definitely see one from the other. If you stand on high ground on the tip of St. Lawrence Island—a larger Alaskan island—you can see the Russian mainland, about 37 miles away. It’s not as if Alaskans can see into the heart of the Kremlin, though. The region you’d see is Chukotka, a desolate expanse of about 285,000 square miles with a population of about 55,000. That’s an area roughly the size of Texas with a population the size of Pine Bluff, Arkansas.” (From
Slate
magazine, “Can You Really See Russia From Alaska?” by Nina Shen Rastogi)

Hi, Mom!

THE WAY WE WEREN’T

Ah, this reminds Uncle John of a page he wrote a long time ago..
.

“Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson: You find the present tense, but the past perfect.”

—
Owens Lee Pomeroy

“Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.”

—
Franklin P. Adams

“The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealized past.”

—
Robertson Davies

“It’s never safe to be nostalgic about something until you’re absolutely certain there’s no chance of its coming back.”

—
Bill Vaughn

“There is no greater sorrow than to recall a happy time when miserable.”

—
Dante Alighieri

“When people talk about the good old days, I say to people, ‘It’s not the days that are old, it’s you that’s old.’ I hate the good old days. What is important is that today is good.”

—
Karl Lagerfeld

“People have this obsession. They want you to be like you were in 1969, because otherwise their youth goes with you. It’s very selfish...but it’s understandable.”

—
Mick Jagger

“What is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?”

—
Letitia Elizabeth Landon

“Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again.”

—
F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The best time is always yesterday.”

—
Tatyana Tolstaya

“Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.”

—
Doug Larson

“How sad and bad and mad it was—but then, how it was sweet.”

—
Robert Browning

A dirty spark plug can reduce your car’s fuel efficiency by as much as 30%.

THE ECONOMY
IN BRIEF(S)

When economists want to get a sense of how the economy is doing, they look at things like the prime lending rate, the unemployment rate, and the Dow Jones Average. It turns out that’s not all they look at
.

D
OWN UNDER

Alan Greenspan was the chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006. He was one of the most influential economists of his day, and his grasp of how the American economy works was profound. He was also famous for keeping an eye on an economic indicator that, on the surface at least, didn’t seem to have much to do with the economy at all: sales of men’s underwear.

What interested Greenspan about men’s underwear was that the sales figures rarely changed. For most men, underwear isn’t something they treat themselves to when they feel like splurging; it’s a purely utilitarian item. They buy it to replace underwear that has worn out. And since underwear wears out at a pretty steady rate, sales of new underwear are pretty steady too.

Greenspan noticed, however, that on occasion underwear sales did dip. When that happened, he interpreted it to mean that significant numbers of men were financially stressed enough that they had stopped replacing their worn-out shorts.

FIRST THINGS FIRST

How many people see you in your underwear? When funds are limited, most men will put off buying underwear—clothes that people
don’t
see—before they stop buying shirts and pants that people
do
see, if for no other reason than to keep up appearances. If they have kids, men will put off buying their own underwear before they’ll stop buying things for their children. For this reason, men’s underwear sales tend to
lead
many other economic indicators—they register signs of economic distress months before sales of other items begin to slow. That’s why Greenspan liked to keep an eye on it: If the economy was losing steam, he’d see it in men’s underwear first.

Amount of fat in the McDonald’s Big Macs America eats every year: 35 million lbs.

THIS, THAT, AND THE OTHER THING

Over the years, economists have developed theories based on a lot of other items besides men’s underwear. For example: