Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (3 page)

• To Amy. Her patience, organizational prowess, and artistic eye has led to yet another book formatted to perfection.

• To Brian, Thom, Jay, and JD, our in-house outhouse writers who are (still) busy finishing up articles they’ve been working on for months. Great job!

• To Julia, our production manager for many years, and Kait, our new production manager. (Welcome to the family, Kait!)

• To our cuckoo cover designer, Michael B. Every year, he surprises us with something new…such as an unsinkable commode, floating in the vast ocean.

• To Angie, who runs in every few days with a few dozen running feet (those facts at the bottom of the page). And Jeff, our formatter-at-large extraordinaire.

• And to our fantastic crew of freelance writers—Lorrie, Jolly Jeff Cheek, Sue, Megan, Kyle, Jef F., Viola, and Nephew Dave.

And finally, a sad farewell to our old friend, Richard Staples, who shared with us his razor-sharp wit and left us a legacy of humor. Thank you, Richard. We’ll miss you.

What gets all of us through life is the ability to laugh and the desire to learn something today that we didn’t know yesterday. Both are waiting for you on the pages ahead, so have fun! And as always…

Keep on going with the Flow
!

—
Uncle John, the BRI Staff, and Porter the Wonderdog

It’s always interesting to find out where the architects of pop culture get their ideas. These may surprise you
.

T
HE T-1000.
The idea for the liquid metal robot that tries to assassinate Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in 1991’s
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
came to director James Cameron while he was eating a hot fudge sundae. He told his effects team that the robot had to look like a “spoon going into hot fudge; it dimples down, then flows up over and closes.”

DOES SHE…OR DOESN’T SHE?
After Clairol introduced this ad campaign in 1956, the number of American women who colored their hair rose from 7 percent to 50 percent, earning it a spot in
Advertising Age’s
“Top 10 Taglines of the 20th Century.” The line, which ends with “only her hairdresser knows for sure,” came from advertising legend Shirley Polykoff. When she returned from her own hairdresser with blond hair, her disapproving mother-in-law asked that same question to Polykoff’s husband…in Yiddish.

THE OAKLAND RAIDERS LOGO.
The pirate’s stern face—drawn in silver and gray, sporting an eye patch and old style football helmet (with two crossed swords behind him)—wasn’t based on a pirate. It was modeled after Hollywood Western star Randolph Scott, who appeared in more than 100 movies in the 1950s.

“OCTOPUS’S GARDEN”
On a boat trip in Sardinia in 1968, Ringo Starr turned down the octopus he was served for lunch. That sparked a conversation about octopuses. According to the Beatles’ drummer, “The captain told me how they go ‘round the sea bed and pick up stones and shiny objects to build gardens. I thought, ‘How fabulous!’”

THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS
. Tim Burton was walking by a storefront one day as workers were removing the Halloween display and setting up for Christmas. Seeing the ghouls and goblins next to Santa and his reindeer got Burton thinking: What would happen if these two worlds collided?

If you’re worried that the really important things in life aren’t being researched by our scientists…keep worrying
.

• Have you ever been around someone who yawned…and you suddenly had to yawn, too? It’s common in humans (no one knows why), but scientists at Birkbeck College in England discovered that dogs can “catch” yawns from people, too. A 29-dog study found that after they made eye contact with a yawning person, 21 of the dogs yawned as well.

• University of London doctoral students Sarah Carter and Kristina Aström discovered that as male college professors ascend the academic ladder—from lecturer to senior lecturer to tenured professor—they are more likely to grow beards.

• In 2005 linguists from the University of Barcelona discovered that rats have difficulty telling the difference between Japanese spoken backward and Dutch spoken backward.

• A joint study conducted by the Gloucestershire Royal Foundation Trust and the Sword Swallowers Association International (really) concluded that sword swallowers were at high risk for sore throats, cuts in the esophagus, and internal bleeding, especially if they were distracted while swallowing swords.

• In the 2004 study “Fragmentation of Rods by Cascading Cracks,” French physicists Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch looked into why when dry spaghetti is bent, it breaks into lots of smaller pieces, instead of cleanly in half.

• Food scientists at Leeds University in England tested more than 700 combinations of cooking temperatures and ingredients in order to determine the formula for the perfect bacon sandwich. Their finding: thin, crunchy bacon works best.

• Cognitive psychologist Daniel Oppenheimer of Princeton wrote a study arguing that short, simple words make writers seem more intelligent than long words do. The name of Oppenheimer’s study: “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity.”

Three origins to keep the sun out of your eyes
.

T
HE STETSON (COWBOY) HAT.
Before the Stetson, ranchers and cowboys wore whatever hats they had, from top hats to sailor caps. During a hunting trip in the late 1850s, John B. Stetson made himself a hat (he knew what he was doing—his father was a hatmaker) with what he considered to be a comically large brim, but soon realized that it was big enough to keep the sun (and rain) off of his head and neck. In 1865 Stetson decided to start making the hats professionally. He rented a room in Houston, Texas, bought some tools and $10 worth of fur, and founded the Stetson Hat Company. Twenty years later, the company employed more than 1,100 people and manufactured hundreds of hats every day. Stetson died in 1906, but the company continued until it shut down in 1971, when it licensed the Stetson name to other hatmakers.

THE SOMBRERO.
Nineteenth-century farmers in the scorching hot farmlands of northern Mexico wove whatever grass or hay they had on hand to make hats big enough to provide protection from the sun on their heads, necks, shoulders, and arms. They called the hats
sombreros
, which comes from
sombra
, the Spanish word for “shade.” Mexican cowboys (
vaqueros
) adopted the hat, but made theirs out of felt or velvet with embroidery, gold thread, and other adornments. Today, the traditional sombrero is mostly worn by mariachi bands and as part of cultural celebrations.

THE FEDORA.
Exactly who invented the fedora is lost to history, but it got its name from the 1882 play
Fedora
. Sarah Bernhardt played Princess Fedora, a European royal who wore the now-familiar soft felt hat with a narrow brim, a crease on top, and a pinch on each side. The fedora became the everyday hat of the 20th century (back when men commonly wore hats) but is most associated with movie tough guys like Humphrey Bogart in
Casablanca
, or real-life tough guys like gangster Al Capone. Men don’t wear formal hats much anymore, but the fedora is still the bestseller in the United States.

What are the correct pronunciations for the words below? The answers might surprise you. If you pronounce them differently, don’t worry—many people do. But here’s how they were originally meant to be pronounced 50, 100, or 200 years ago—and, according to the dictionary, still should be
.

STATUS:
“stay-tus”

TRANSIENT:
It has two syllables not three, so it’s “transhent,” not “tran-zee-ent.”

APPLICABLE:
The first syllable is the one that should be emphasized, as in
app-
lic-able, rather than app-
lic
-able.

VALET:
It’s not a French word, so pronouncing the last syllable as “ay” is incorrect. It should be sounded as “val-it.” (Another fake French word: foyer, which is pronounced “foy-ur,” not “foy-ay.”)

SPHERICAL:
“sferr-i-kal,” not “sfeer-i-kal.”

EITHER:
“Eee-thur” or “aye-thur”? “Eee-thur” is the preferred way. (And so is “nee-thur.”)

PRELUDE:
“pray-lood” is incorrect; the proper pronunciation is “prel-yood.”

FORTE:
If you’re discussing someone’s “forte,” as in a strength, the “e” is silent. “Fortay” is correct only if you’re using it as a musical term.

DECREASE:
If you’re using it as a noun, it’s
de
-crease. If you’re using it as a verb, it’s de-
crease
.

ERR:
Rhymes with “hair?” No, it rhymes with “her.”

CARAMEL:
“Kah-ruh-mull” is the original way and still the preferred way, although “kar-mull,” which was once a Midwestern regional pronunciation, is also acceptable.

GALA:
“gay-luh”

MAUVE:
It once rhymed with “stove,” but now the “au” is sounded as “aw.”

REGIME:
The first syllable is sounded as “ray.”

JOUST:
In the 13th century, it was pronounced (and spelled) like the word “just.”

LONG-LIVED:
Today we say the “lived” as “livd,” but until the 20th century, it was pronounced “lyved.”

QUASI:
Today it’s often pronounced “kwah-zee,” but it’s more correct to say “kway–zi.”

Everyone’s amused by tales of outrageous blunders—probably because it’s comforting to know that someone else is screwing up even worse than we are. So go ahead and feel superior for a few minutes
.

B
IKELAHOMA
In 2001 a German bicyclist named Gerhard Brunger set out from Quebec in an attempt to cycle all the way across Canada. But he never made it. Somehow, despite numerous border checkpoints, Brunger unknowingly crossed the border into the United States and got all the way to Oklahoma—about 1,000 miles from the Canadian border—before he realized where he was.

One night in 2008, a taxi driver named Shen in Huaninan, China, picked up a passenger who was carrying a load of boxes, bags, and appliances. Curiously, he was also carrying a frozen fish. “I thought how much it looked like the fish in my freezer at home,” Shen later said. After dropping the man off at his apartment, Shen returned to his own home, where he discovered that most of his possessions—including his frozen fish—had been stolen.

While running for president in March 2007, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney gave a speech in Florida to a group of fiercely anti-Communist, anti-Castro Cuban-Americans. He ended the speech with a phrase delivered in Spanish: “
Patria o muerte, venceremos
!” Romney’s Spanish was impeccable, but the phrase was poorly chosen. It translates to “Fatherland or death, we shall overcome!” It’s the Communist rallying cry routinely used since the 1950s by Cuban dictator Fidel Castro at the end of speeches.

In June 2008, at the U.S. Olympics trials in Eugene, Oregon, sprinter Tyson Gay won the 100-meter event.
OneNewsNow.com
—a news service run by the conservative American Family Association—reported the story, but because they use computerized word
replacement filters that substitute “family-friendly” words for ones they find objectionable, readers were told that the 100 meters was won by “Tyson Homosexual.”

At 6'2", 238 pounds, David Kidwell is one of the biggest and toughest guys in Australia’s National Rugby League. On Easter 2007, he suffered an injury that benched him for the rest of the season: He tore a knee ligament tripping over his two-year-old daughter.

In March 2008, a man called in to Howard Stern’s satellite radio show to report that he thought he’d almost met the radio host a few days earlier. While on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, the man spotted a tall person with long, dark hair getting out of a limo. Believing it to be Stern, the man rushed over, yelling “Yo, Howard, I am such a huge fan!” When the person turned around, the man saw that it wasn’t Stern—it was Cher. “You thought I was Howard Stern?” Cher reportedly yelled back. “What did you have for breakfast this morning, a bowl of stupid?”

Joshua Mullen of Mobile, Alabama, spotted a swarm of bees in his utility shed. Trying to kill them, or at least make them go away, Mullen dumped a can of gasoline onto the pile of rags where the bees were congregating, then ran away. A few minutes later the pilot light from a nearby water heater ignited the gas fumes. The shed burned down and the fire spread to Mullen’s house, ultimately causing $80,000 in damage. “Looking at all this, there might have been a better way,” said Mullen.