Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Extraordinary Book of Facts: And Bizarre Information (43 page)

SALARY

Meaning:
A regular payment made by an employer to an employee

Origin:
“A salary, during the great days of the Romans, was called a
salarium
, ‘salt-money.’ The ancients regarded salt as such an essential to good diet (and before refrigeration it was the only chemical that preserved meat) that they made a special allowance in the wages of soldiers to buy
sal
(Latin for ‘salt’). With time any stipend came to be called a salarium, from which English acquired the word
salary
.” (
Hue and Cry and Humble Pie
, by Morton S. Freeman)

BLINDFOLD

Meaning:
A piece of cloth tied around the head to cover the eyes

Origin:
“The name of the folded piece of cloth has only a coincidental resemblance to the way the material is doubled over.
Blindfold
actually comes from the Middle English
blindfeld
, ‘to be struck blind.’ Walter Tyndale used
blyndfolded
in his English translation of the Bible (1526), and if he was not the first to make the mistake, he was certainly the most influential.” (
Devious Derivations
, by Hugh Rawson)

Before World War I, Aspirin was a registered trademark of the German company Bayer. When Germany lost the war, Bayer gave the trademark to the Allies as a reparation in the Treaty of Versailles.

Why do men wear fragrances? Thanks to some clever marketing during World War II, Old Spice aftershave became part of the soldier’s standard-issue toiletry kit and “changed the smell of things.”

Hate taking care of your contact lenses? It could be worse. Early contacts were made from wax molds (wax was poured over the eyes). The lenses, made of glass, cut off tear flow and severely irritated the eyes. In fact, the whole ordeal was so painful that scientists recommended an anesthetic solution of cocaine.

On average, each person uses 54 feet of dental floss every year. That may sound like a lot, but dentists recommend the use of one and a half feet of dental floss each day. That’s equal to 548 feet a year.

In the late 1940s aerosol hair spray was a growing fad among American women. The only problem was that it was water insoluble, which made it hard to wash out. Why? The earliest fixative was shellac, more commonly used to preserve wood.

Ancient Chinese, Roman, and German societies frequently used urine as mouthwash. Surprisingly, the ammonia in urine is a good cleanser. (Ancient cultures had no way of knowing that.)

Number of ice cubes the average American puts in a glass: 3.2.

About 77 million babies were part of the baby boom generation. Four percent of them walk to work.

Four percent of Americans are allergic to hamsters.

More Americans claim German ancestry (46.5 percent) than any other. Irish ancestry is number two, at 33 percent.

Fifty percent of Americans believe humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs.

Ninety percent of Americans thought income taxes were fair in 1944. Only 51 percent agreed in 2005.

When asked to name the odor that best defines America, 39 percent of Americans said “barbecue.”

Forty-nine percent of Americans say they pray to God for financial advice.

Most adults believe we will make “first contact” with alien life by the year 2100.

Fifty-eight seconds for the elevator in Toronto’s CN Tower to reach the top (1,815 feet)

One minute for a newborn baby’s brain to grow 1.5 mg

Forty-five minutes to reach an actual person when calling the IRS during tax time

Four hours, 30 minutes to cook a 20-pound turkey at 325°F

Ninety-two hours to read both the Old and New Testaments aloud

Ninety-six hours to completely recover from jet lag

Seven days for a newborn baby to wet or soil 80 diapers

Nineteen days until baby cardinals make their first flight

Twenty-five days for Handel to compose
The Messiah

Thirty days for a human hair to grow half an inch

Here’s a small selection of our favorite
conspiracy theories, unexplained deaths,
and other thought-provoking topics.

What do you think: Is it fact or fiction?

Plenty of people really believe Elvis is still alive. As RCA Records used to ask: Can millions of Elvis fans be wrong? You be the judge
.

E
arly in the morning of August 16, 1977, Elvis Presley and his girlfriend, Ginger Alden, returned to Graceland from a late-night dentist appointment. The two stayed up until about 7 a.m., when Alden went to bed. But, according to one source, “because he had taken some ‘uppers,’ Elvis was still not sleepy.” So the King retired to his bathroom to read a book. (Sound familiar?) That was the last time anyone saw him alive.

THE OFFICIAL STORY

When Alden woke up at 2:00 in the afternoon, she noticed that Elvis was still in his bathroom so she decided to check on him.

When she opened the door, she saw Elvis sprawled face forward on the floor. “I thought at first he might have hit his head because he had fallen,” she recalls, “and his face was buried in the carpet. I slapped him a few times and it was like he breathed once when I turned his head. I lifted one eyelid and it was just blood red. But I couldn’t move him.” The King was dead.

Elvis was rushed to Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis, but doctors could not revive him. He was pronounced dead at 3:00 p.m. The official cause of death: cardiac arrhythmia brought on by “straining at stool.” (The actual cause of death: most likely a massive overdose of prescription drugs.) That is what is supposed to have happened. Nevertheless, Elvis aficionados across the country see a host of mysterious circumstances that suggest the King may still be alive.

SUSPICIOUS FACTS

 •   The medical examiner’s report stated that Elvis’s body was found
in the bathroom in a rigor-mortised state. But the homicide report said that Elvis was found unconscious in the bedroom. In
The Elvis Files
, Gail Brewer-Giorgio notes, “Unconsciousness and rigor mortis are at opposite ends of the physical spectrum: rigor mortis is a stiffening condition that occurs after death; unconsciousness, a state in which a living body loses awareness. Bedroom and bathroom are two different places.”

 •   The medical examiner’s report lists Elvis’s weight at the time of death as 170 pounds; he actually weighed about 250 pounds.

 •   Elvis’s relatives can’t agree on how Elvis died. His stepbrother Rick claims Elvis suffocated on the shag carpet; his stepbrother David thinks Elvis committed suicide. Larry Geller, Elvis’s hairdresser and spiritual adviser, claims that Elvis’s doctors told Vernon Presley (Elvis’s father) that the King had leukemia, which may have contributed to his death. Some theorists charge that the confusion surrounding Elvis’s death proves that the star faked his death. If the King is really dead, why can’t his loved ones get their stories straight?

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

Did Elvis foresee—or fake—his death?

 •   Elvis didn’t order any new jumpsuits—his trademark outfit—in all of 1977. Why not? Did he know he wasn’t going to need any?

 •   On his last concert tour, Elvis was overheard saying, “I may not look good tonight, but I’ll look good in my coffin.”

 •   Was Elvis imitating his manager, Colonel Tom Parker? As a young man, Parker also faked his death. An illegal immigrant from Holland whose real name was Andreas Van Kujik, Parker left Holland without telling his relatives; they thought he was dead.

Was the corpse in Elvis’s coffin really Elvis’s?

 •   Country singer Tanya Tucker’s sister LaCosta was at the King’s funeral, and she was shocked at the body’s appearance: “We went right up to his casket and stood there, and God, I couldn’t believe it. He looked just like a piece of plastic laying there. He didn’t
look like him at all . . . he looked more like a dummy than a real person. You know a lot of people think it was a dummy. They don’t think he was dead.”

 •   Some observers said they thought the corpse’s nose looked too “pugged” to be the King’s. They speculated that even if the King had fallen forward and smashed his nose at the time of his death, it would have naturally returned to its original shape, or would at least have been fixed by the undertaker—if the body was really Elvis’s. (
The Elvis Files
)

Was the corpse in Elvis’s coffin a wax dummy?

 •   Some theorists believe that Elvis’s coffin weighed more than it was supposed to. Brewer-Giorgio reports receiving a letter from an Elvis fan who claimed to have personally known the man who made the King’s coffin. The coffin maker revealed that the casket was a rush order—and that there was no way the coffin could have weighed 900 pounds, as the press reported—even with the King in it. So what was in the coffin with Elvis that made it so heavy?

 •   According to Brewer-Giorgio, the discrepancy between the coffin’s actual weight with Elvis in it and its weight at the funeral is about 250 to 275 pounds, “the weight of a small air-conditioner.” “Was there an air-conditioner in the coffin?” Brewer-Giorgio asks, “Wax dummy? Something cool to keep the wax from beading up?”

 •   To many witnesses, Elvis’s corpse appeared to be “sweating” at the funeral. Brewer-Giorgio says she asked Joe Esposito, Elvis’s road manager, about TV reports that there were “beads of sweat” on Elvis’s body. “He said that was true, that everyone was sweating because the air-conditioner had broken down. Except that dead bodies do not sweat.” But wax melts.

Why were the mourners acting so strange at the funeral?

 •   Parker wore a loud Hawaiian shirt and a baseball cap to Elvis’s funeral and never once approached the casket to say farewell to the King. Elvis’s fans argue that if Elvis were really dead, Parker would probably have shown a little more respect.

 •   Elvis’s hairdresser claims that he saw Esposito remove Elvis’s TCB (Takin’ Care of Business) ring from the corpse’s finger during the funeral services. Why would he remove one of Elvis’s favorite pieces of jewelry? Elvis would surely have wanted to have been buried with it—unless the corpse being buried wasn’t the King’s?

Is Elvis in the Federal Witness Protection Program?

 •   In 1970 Presley—a law enforcement buff—was made an honorary agent-at-large of the Drug Enforcement Administration by President Nixon, after a visit to the White House. According to some theorists, Presley became more than just an honorary agent—he actually got involved in undercover narcotics work.

 •   In addition to his DEA work, Elvis may have been an FBI agent. During the same trip to Washington, D.C., Elvis also wrote a letter to J. Edgar Hoover, volunteering his confidential services to the FBI. Hoover wrote back thanking Elvis for his offer, but there is no record of him ever taking it up. Still, Brewer-Giorgio and other theorists argue that the government may have been keeping the King’s government service a secret.

 •   According to Brewer-Giorgio, Elvis was also “a bonded deputy with the Memphis Police and was known to don disguises and go out on narc busts.”

 •   Elvis took his law enforcement role seriously. More than one biography details the time that the King ran out onto the runway of the Las Vegas airport, flagged down a taxiing commercial airliner, and searched it for a man whom he believed had stolen something from him. Elvis looked around, realized his quarry wasn’t aboard, and gave the pilot permission to take off.

 •   Some theorists believe that Elvis’s extensive work in law enforcement made him a target for drug dealers and the Mob—and that he entered the Federal Witness Protection Program out of fear for his life. According to Brewer-Giorgio, when Elvis supplied the information that sent a major drug dealer to prison, the King and his family received death threats.

Could Elvis Be in Hiding?

Hundreds of Elvis’s loyal fans think they have spotted the King since his “death.” He’s been sighted at a Rolling Stones concert, working at a Burger King in Kalamazoo, buying gas in Tennessee, and shopping for old Monkees records in Michigan. One woman even claims that Elvis gave her a bologna sandwich and a bag of Cheetos during a 1987 visit to the Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio. Could so many people be lying or mistaken?

OTHER MYSTERIES COLLECTED BY ELVIS FANS

 •   Vernon Presley never went to the hospital the night Elvis “died.” If Elvis were really dead, he probably would have.

 •   According to some reports, within hours of Presley’s death, souvenir shops near Graceland began selling commemorative T-shirts of his death. How could they have made so many T-shirts in so little time—unless Graceland had let them know about the “death” in advance?

 •   Elvis’s middle name, Aron, is misspelled “Aaron” on his tombstone. If he’s really dead, why don’t his relatives correct the mistake?

 •   Elvis is not buried next to his mother as he requested. Says Brewer-Giorgio: “‘Elvis loved his mother very much and always said he would be buried beside her,’ many fans have noted. ‘So why is he buried between his father and grandmother?’ they ask.”