Uncle John’s Briefs (35 page)

WHY DO YOU FART?

Flatulence has many causes—for example, swallowing air as you eat and lactose intolerance. (Lactose is a sugar molecule in milk, and many people lack the enzyme needed to digest it.) But the most common cause is food that ferments in the gastro intestinal tract.

• A simple explanation: The fats, proteins, and carbohydrates you eat become a “gastric soup” in your stomach. This soup then passes into the small intestine, where much of it is absorbed through the intestinal walls into the bloodstream to feed the body.

• But the small intestine can’t absorb everything, especially complex carbohydrates. Some complex carbohydrates—the ones made up of several sugar molecules (beans, some milk products, fiber) can’t be broken down. So they’re simply passed along to the colon, where bacteria living in your intestine feed off the fermenting brew. If that sounds gross, try this: The bacteria then excrete gases into your colon. Farting is how your colon rids itself of the pressure the gas creates.

FRUIT OF THE VINE

So why not just quit eating complex carbohydrates?

• First, complex carbohydrates––which include fruit, vegetables, and whole grains—are crucial for a healthy diet. “Put it this way,” explains Jeff Rank, an associate professor of gastroenterology at the University of Minnesota. “Cabbage and beans are bad for gas, but they are good for you.”

Most popular condiment in ancient Rome:
liquamen
—a strong fish sauce made from anchovies.

• Second, they’re not the culprits when it comes to the least desirable aspect of farting: smell.

• Farts are about 99% odorless gases—hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, oxygen, and methane (it’s the methane that makes farts flammable). So why the odor? Blame it on those millions of bacteria living in your colon. Their waste gases usually contain sulfur molecules—which smell like rotten eggs. This is the remaining 1% that clears rooms in a hurry.

AM I NORMAL?

• Johnson & Johnson, which produces drugs for gas and indigestion, once conducted a survey and found that almost one-third of Ameri cans believe they have a flatulence problem.

• However, according to Terry Bolin and Rosemary Stanton, authors of
Wind Breaks: Coming to Terms with Flatulence
, doctors say most flatu lence is healthy. What’s unhealthy is worrying about it so much.

NOTABLE FARTERS

• Le Petomane, a 19th-century music hall performer, had the singular ability to control his farts. He could play tunes, as well as imitate animal and machinery sounds rectally. Le Petomane’s popularity briefly rivaled that of Sarah Bernhardt.

• A computer factory in England, built on the site of a 19th-century chapel, is reportedly inhabited by a farting ghost. Workers think it might be the embarrassed spirit of a girl who farted while singing in church. “On several occasions,” said an employee, “there has been a faint girlish voice singing faint hymns, followed by a loud raspberry sound and then a deathly hush.”

• Josef Stalin was afraid of farting in public. He kept glasses and a water pitcher on his desk so that if he felt a wind coming on, he could mask the sound by clinking the glasses while pouring water.

• Martin Luther believed, “On the basis of personal experience, farts could scare off Satan himself.”

“Why doesn’t Tarzan have a beard?” —
George Carlin

The average car has about 3,000 feet of electrical wiring.

UNIQUELY PRESIDENTIAL

You may know that Richard Nixon was the only U.S. president to resign or
that Grover Cleveland was the only president to serve two non-consecutive
terms. But there are many more presidential anomalies than that
.

T
he president:
Jimmy Carter
Notable achievement:
Only president to write a children’s book. Carter wrote
The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer
, which was illustrated by his daughter Amy, and published in 1995. The plot: A crippled boy named Jeremy meets a repulsive sea monster who turns out to be quite friendly.

The president:
Abraham Lincoln
Notable achievement:
Only president to earn a patent. In 1849 Lincoln invented a type of buoy. Lincoln is also the only U.S. president to have worked as a bartender.

The president:
Theodore Roosevelt
Notable achievement:
Only president to be blind in one eye. Roosevelt took a hard punch to his left eye in a boxing match. It detached the retina, leaving Roosevelt blind in his left eye for the rest of his life. The boxing match occurred in 1908, while Roosevelt was president.

The president:
Richard Nixon
Notable achievement:
Only president to have been a carny. When he was a teenager, Richard Nixon was a midway barker at the Slippery Gulch Rodeo in Arizona.

The president:
Gerald Ford
Notable achievement:
Only president to survive two assassination attempts in the same month. In September 1975, former Charles Manson follower Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme tried to shoot Ford when he reached out to shake her hand in a public meet-and-greet. She pulled the trigger, but the gun’s chamber was empty. Just three weeks later another woman, Sara Jane Moore, fired on Ford in a similar crowd situation, but a bystander knocked her arm away.

In Seattle, Washington, a dog must pay full bus fare if it weighs more than 25 pounds.

JAWS, JR.

They’re just little fishes, but piranhas can turn you into a
skeleton in a few seconds flat. Nice thought, huh?

T
HE NAME.
The word “piranha” comes from the Tupi language of South America and means “toothed fish.” In some local dialects of the Amazon region, the name for common household scissors is also “piranha.”

NOT A SHARK.
A piranha only has one row of upper and lower teeth, not several, as many sharks do. But its teeth are sharper than almost any shark teeth. When the piranha snaps them together, says one expert, “the points in the upper row fit into the notches of the lower row, and the power of the jaw muscles is such that there is scarcely any living substance save the hardest ironwood that will not be clipped off.” Natives often use the teeth as cutting blades.

FISHING TIP.
Piranhas are capable of biting through a fishing net. If caught on a hook, they usually die from the injury. So a good way to “bring them in alive” is to throw a chunk of meat in the water. The fish will bite into it so hard that you can lift bunches of them out of the water before they let go.

BEHAVIOR.
Some things that attract piranhas are blood and splashing. Experts disagree over whether the fish will attack a calm, uninjured person, but piranhas are definitely territorial. That’s why Amazon fishermen know that if they catch a piranha, they’d better try another spot if they expect to catch anything else.

DEADLY DIET.
Surprisingly, only a few species of piranha are meat-eaters; many eat fruits and other plants that fall into the river. But those meat-eaters can do exactly what you think they can. In the 19th century, for example, Teddy Roosevelt wrote about his adventures along the Amazon. He claimed to have seen piranhas quickly make a skeleton of a man who had fallen off his horse and into the river.

Makes sense: Arkansas was once spelled Arkansaw.

THE FIRST…

A bunch of musical firsts
.

…pop album with printed lyrics:
The Beatles’
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
, 1967.

…singer to refuse a Grammy:
Sinéad O’Connor won Best Alternative Album prize in 1990 for
I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got
. She declined the award to protest the Grammys’ “extreme commercialism.”

…foreign-language #1 pop song:
“Volare,” by Italian singer Domenico Modugno. It went to the top of the Billboard charts in 1958.

…double album:
Benny Goodman’s
Live at Carnegie Hall
, 1938. First rock double album: Bob Dylan’s 1966
Blonde on Blonde
.

…American pop band to tour the Soviet Union:
the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, in 1977.

…musical guest on
Saturday Night Live
:
Billy Preston. He beat the debut show’s other guest, Janis Ian, by about 20 minutes.

…recorded yelling of “Free Bird!” at a concert:
1976, at the Fox Theater in Atlanta. The show was being taped for Lynyrd Skynyrd’s live album,
One More From the Road
.

…music book published in the United States:
Seven Songs for Harpsichord or Forte-Piano
, by Francis Hopkinson, in 1788.

…African-American recording artists:
Pianist Willie “The Lion” Smith of Newark, New Jersey, who played on the 1920 song “Crazy Blues” by Mamie Smith’s Jazz Hounds.

…British musician with a #1 single in the United States:
It’s not the Beatles—it’s Mr. Acker Bilk, whose clarinet instrumental “Stranger on the Shore” topped the American charts in 1962.

…band to rock Antarctica:
Nunatuk, a band made up of resident British researchers, who performed in Antarctica as part of a series of environmental awareness concerts in 2007.

…album on CD:
ABBA’s 1981 album
The Visitors
.

Dolly Parton’s first single: “Puppy Love” (1960). She was 13.

CASTLE IN THE DESERT

How a cowboy named “Death Valley Scotty” conned his way into fame, fortune…and a big house that didn’t belong to him
.

H
OT PROPERTY
In a desolate canyon in Death Valley National Park sits a 33,000-square-foot Spanish-Mediterranean castle with 14 bathrooms, 14 fireplaces, 4 kitchens, a solar water heating plant, a hydroelectric generating system, a gas station, stables for dozens of horses, and a 56-foot clock tower complete with 25 chimes. The main house has a rock wall fountain, is decorated with European antiques, hand-painted tiles, and handcrafted ironwork, and features a theater organ with 1,121 pipes and a 250-foot unfinished swimming pool. The castle sits on 1,500 acres and is surrounded by a 45-mile-long fence. It cost $2 million to build in the 1920s.

Walter Scott lived there in high style for decades. He claimed the castle as his own and said that it sat atop a gold mine. But the truth was he didn’t have a cent.

A DRIFTING GRIFTER

Walter Scott was born in Kentucky in 1872. He left home at 11 to become a cowboy in Nevada and, at 13, got a job working as a water boy for the Harmony Borax Works in Death Valley. By the time he was 18, he was such a skilled rider that Buffalo Bill Cody offered Scott a role in his Wild West Show. For 12 years Scott traveled and performed throughout the United States and Europe. In 1901 he arrived in New York City, where he was supposed to ride into town with the other performers. But he went out drinking instead. Buffalo Bill saw Scott standing drunk (and cheering) along the parade route and fired him on the spot.

He was out of work but not out of ideas. Scott had (unsuccessfully) worked a gold mine for one winter in Colorado, so, well versed in the art of publicity from his days with the Wild West Show, he invented a tale about a gold mine in Death Valley, one of the most remote areas of the country and the perfect place to hide a fictitious gold mine. Scott lured several New York investors with tales of the lucrative mine and convinced
them to give him money to excavate the ore in exchange for a percentage of the profits.

A cell-phone app called Date Check lets users run a background check on potential dates.

A PRO AT CONS

There was no mine, but Scott took the money anyway and headed to California. Once there, he lived it up in the towns around Death Valley and in Los Angeles. He stayed in expensive hotels and tipped in large bills.

Even though none of the money went to mining equipment, he continued spinning his tale and investors continued to give him money. When his backers asked why they hadn’t seen any ore or profits from the mine, Scott put them off, saying there had been a mule stampede, a flash flood, or a run-in with bandits.

ENTER ALBERT JOHNSON

One investor, though, started to distrust Scott’s excuses. Born in 1872, Albert Johnson had made a fortune in zinc mining but also made several bad investments. In 1906 Johnson invested in Scott’s gold mine.

Three years passed before Johnson began to doubt Scott’s tales, but in 1909, he traveled to California to see for himself the Death Valley Mine whose riches never seemed to materialize. Scott agreed to take Johnson to the mine, believing the trip would prove too difficult for the Easterner and that Johnson would back out before they ever reached the “site.” But Johnson loved the desert. Ten years earlier, he’d been injured in a train crash, and he still suffered the ill effects of a broken back. The dry climate and the adventure in Death Valley made him feel better than he had in years.