Uncle John’s Briefs (6 page)

If you get out of bed with your left foot first, you’re going to have a bad day.

If your left palm itches, you’re going to owe someone money. If your right palm does, you’re going to make some money.

LEFT-HANDED MISCELLANY

• Why are lefties called “southpaws”? In the late 1890s, most baseball parks were laid out with the pitcher facing west and the batter facing east (so the sun wouldn’t be in his eyes). That meant left-handed pitchers threw with the arm that faced south. So Chicago sportswriter Charles Seymour began calling them “southpaws.”

• Right-handed bias: Some Native American tribes strapped their children’s left arms to the mother’s cradleboard, which caused most infants to become predominantly right-handed. In South Africa, people achieved similar results by burying the left hands of left-handed children in the burning desert sand.

• The next time you see a coat of arms, check to see if it has a stripe running diagonally across it. Most stripes are called
bends
and run from the top left to the bottom right. A stripe that runs from the bottom left to the top right, is called a “left-handed” bend or a
bend sinister
—and means the bearer was a bastard.

“What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case I definitely overpaid for my carpet.” —Woody Allen

DRINK UP

The origins of three of America’s favorite drinks
.

M
OUNTAIN DEW.
Invented in the 1940s by Ally Hartman of Knoxville, it was intended as a chaser for Tennessee whiskey. The original version looked and tasted like 7-Up, but after Hartman sold the formula in 1954, a succession of new owners tinkered with it. According to one account, credit for the final version goes to William H. Jones, who bought the formula in 1961 and sold it to Pepsi three years later. “He fixed it so it had just a little more tang to it, mainly by adding citrus flavoring and caffeine,” a business associate recalls. “He’d take little cups marked A, B, C, and D around to high schools and factories and ask people which mixture tasted best. That’s how he developed his formula.”

V-8 JUICE.
In 1933, W. G. Peacock founded the New England Products Company and began manufacturing spinach juice, lettuce juice, and other vegetable juices. Even though the country was in the midst of a health craze, few people wanted to drink Peacock’s concoctions. So he began mixing the drinks together, hoping to find something more marketable. It took about a year, but he finally came up with a drink he called Vege-min—a combination of tomato, celery, carrot, spinach, lettuce, watercress, beet, and parsley juices. The label had a huge V for Vege-min and a large 8 listing the different juices. One day, as he gave a free sample to a grocer in Evanston, Illinois, a clerk suggested he just call the product V-8.

A&W ROOT BEER.
Roy Allen made a living buying and selling hotels…until he met an old soda fountain operator who gave him a formula for root beer. “You can make a fortune with a five-cent root beer,” the guy told him. It was during Prohibition when beer was illegal, so Allen decided there was a market for a root beer stand that looked like a Wild West “saloon”—including a bar and sawdust on the floor. The first stand, opened in Lodi, California, in 1919, did so well that Allen opened a second one in nearby Stockton and made one of his employees, Frank Wright, a partner. In 1922 they named the company A&W, after their own initials.

FIRSTS

Q:
What does everything in the world have in common? A: There was a first one
.

First brewery in North America:
opened in New Amsterdam (Manhattan) in 1612.

First professional sports organization in the United States:
the Maryland Jockey Club, founded in 1743.

First American to fly in a hot air balloon:
Edward Warren (1784).

First American cookbook:
American Cookery
, published by Amelia Simmons in 1796.

First refrigerator:
invented by Thomas Moore in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1803.

First flea circus performance:
took place in New York City in 1835.

First American novel to sell a million copies:
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852).

First drive-in movie theater:
opened in Camden, New Jersey, in 1933. (Picture shown:
Wives Beware
, starring Adolphe Menjou.)

First female celebrity to wear pants in public:
Actress Sarah Bernhardt was photographed wearing men’s trousers in 1876.

First blood transfusion:
June 1667, by Jean-Baptiste Denys, a French doctor, to a 15-year-old boy. (He got lamb’s blood.)

First electric hand drill:
invented by Wilhelm Fein of Norwell, Massachusetts, in 1895.

First tank:
built in 1916 and nicknamed “Little Willie,” it could only go 2 mph and never saw duty in battle.

First drink of Kool-Aid:
taken by chemist Edwin Perkins of Hastings, Nebraska, in 1927.

World’s first flight attendant:
Ellen Church, hired in 1930. (She wanted to be a pilot.)

First coast-to-coast direct-dial phone call:
made from Englewood, New Jersey, to Alameda, California, in 1951.

First
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader:
went to press in 1988.

A polar bear can smell a seal up to 18 miles away under a sheet of ice.

YAH-HAH, EVIL
SPIDER WOMAN!

Until recently, law required all movies made in Hong Kong to have English subtitles. But producers spent as little on translations as possible…and it shows. These gems are actual subtitles from action movies
.

“Take my advice, or I’ll spank you without pants.”

“Fatty, you with your thick face have hurt my instep.”

“You always use violence. I should’ve ordered glutinous rice chicken.”

“Who gave you the nerve to get killed here?”

“This will be of fine service for you, you bag of the scum. I am sure you will not mind that I remove your toenails and leave them out on the dessert floor for ants to eat.”

“A normal person wouldn’t steal pituitaries.”

“That may disarray my intestines.”

“The bullets inside are very hot. Why do I feel so cold?”

“Beware! Your bones are going to be disconnected.”

“I am darn unsatisfied to be killed in this way.”

“If you don’t eat people, they’ll eat you.”

“She’s terrific. I can’t stand her.”

“Darn, I’ll burn you into a BBQ chicken.”

“I’ll cut your fats out, don’t you believe it?”

“Sex fiend, you’ll never get reincarnated!”

“How can I make love without TV?”

“I got knife scars more than the number of your leg’s hair!”

“Yah-hah, evil spider woman! I have captured you by the short rabbits and can now deliver you violently to your doctor for a thorough extermination.”

“What is a soul? It’s just a toilet paper.”

The first minute of the day officially starts at 12:00 midnight.

CANADIANS ON CANADA

Some quotes from the Great White North
.

“Canada is a country whose main exports are hockey players and cold fronts. Our main import is acid rain.”

—Pierre Trudeau

“I have to spend so much time explaining to Americans that I am not English and to Englishmen that I am not American that I have little time left to be Canadian.”

—Laurence J. Peter

“Canada is the essence of not being: not English; not American. And a subtle flavour—we’re more like…celery.”

—Mike Myers

“We’ll explain the appeal of curling to you if you explain the appeal of the National Rifle Association to us.”

—Andy Barrie, radio host

“Canadians don’t have a very big political lever. We’re nice guys.”

—Paul Henderson, athlete

“Maybe you live somewhere that doesn’t have snow in April; if so, I hope you appreciate it.”

—Spider Robinson, author

“Hockey captures the essence of Canadian experience. In a land so inescapably and inhospitably cold, hockey is the chance of life, and an affirmation that despite the deathly chill of winter we are alive.”

—Stephen Leacock

“Canadians are the people who learned to live without the bold accents of the natural ego-trippers of other lands.”

—Marshall McLuhan

“The great themes of Canadian history are as follows: keeping the Americans out, the French in, and trying to get the Natives to somehow disappear.”

—Will Ferguson

“There’s something romantic about being Canadian. We’re a relatively unpopulated, somewhat civilized, clean, and resourceful country.”

—k. d. lang

“I speak English and French, not Klingon. I drink Labatt’s, not Romulan Ale…My name is

William Shatner and I AM CANADIAN!”

—William Shatner

Most of Bill Gates’s 50,000-square-foot home is underground.

DIED ON THE JOHN

From the darker wing of Uncle John’s Stall of Fame, here are some people who took their last breaths in the bathroom. (Someday we’ll probably put Uncle John on the list.)

I
n 1016, 27-year-old King Edmund II of England was murdered in the bathroom. An assassin hid behind the primitive toilet and, as Edmund sat, the murderer stepped out and quickly shoved his sword twice “into the king’s bowels.”

• Another English monarch, King George II, died on the toilet in 1760 at the age of 77. He woke up at six that morning, drank some chocolate, and an hour later went to the bathroom, where he died of a ruptured aorta.

• Evelyn Waugh, one of the greatest English novelists of the 20th century (
Brideshead Revisited, The Loved One
) had just returned home from Easter Mass. In recent years, the 62-year-old had put on a lot of weight. He also drank a lot, smoked cigars, and rarely exercised. He died “straining at stool” in the bathroom, April 10, 1966.

• Perhaps the most famous death-by-toilet is Elvis Presley’s. A combination of weight gain and too many prescription drugs gave the 42-year-old singer a heart attack while he was “takin’ care of business.” (At the time of his death he was reading a book entitled
The Scientific Search for the Face of Jesus
.)

• Movie producer Don Simpson (
Top Gun, Flashdance
) died in 1996. While rumors persisted that he died of a cocaine overdose, the truth was more humble and embarrassing: He died of a heart attack while going to the bathroom.

• It’s commonly believed that Catherine the Great of Russia died after being “crushed” by a horse. True? Na-a-a-a-a-y. On that fateful day in 1796, she suffered a stroke while sitting on the toilet, but died in her bed several hours later.

To be called a “heavy rainfall,” it must be raining at least 1/6 of an inch per hour.

FLINTSTONE V. JETSON

Who’s the bigger environmental (Hanna) barbarian?

A
N ANIMATED DEBATE
One is from the Stone Age, and one is from the distant future, but Fred Flintstone (of
The Flintstones
, 1960–66) and George Jetson (of
The Jetsons
, 1962–63) are a lot alike: Both are middle-class family men just trying to get by. Here’s where these two fictional characters from 40-year-old cartoon shows truly and most importantly differ: Who had the larger carbon footprint?

FRED FLINTSTONE: GOOD