Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (34 page)

• If you have aggressive driving habits, such as rapid acceleration and frequent braking, back off a little. Don’t accelerate hard just to brake again a short time later; it uses extra gas and wears out your brake pads. It’s better to try to maintain a constant speed, with no unnecessary acceleration.

• When you do need to accelerate, do so gently—slow acceleration uses less gas than rapid acceleration. One simple trick for moderating your rate of acceleration is to use the resume/accelerate switch on the cruise control to speed up, instead of stepping on the gas. Cruise control is designed to accelerate at a slow rate, and when you accelerate slowly you use less gas. (Study your owner’s manual first if you don’t know all the ins and outs of your cruise control system.)

• By eliminating unnecessary acceleration and applying the gas a little more moderately when you need to speed up, you could save an additional 2 to 3 miles per gallon—that’s 30 additional miles for every 10 gallons of gas in your tank.

Want more tips on hypermiling? Drive over to page 294. (But please try to keep your speed under 55 mph.)

Inspiring tales of everyday entrepreneurs
.

P
RODUCT
: The Slug-X slug trap
BACKGROUND
: In 1999 Inge Beaumont, a 77-year-old retiree and longtime gardener, set out to solve a common gardening problem: how to get rid of slugs…without using poison. Over the next year she tried several different trap designs, and finally came up with a one that worked: a box the size and shape of a cigar box, with a lift-off lid that covers three small wells. What do you put in the wells? Beer—slugs love it. Openings in the side of the trap allow slugs into the wells, where they drink…and drown. “Quite a pleasant way to die,” Beaumont said.

SUCCESS STORY
: She knew the traps were so good that she had several hundred manufactured and set up an online company, Westfield Products, to sell them. “We had problems to begin with,” she said, “as I had never used a computer before.” It didn’t matter: As word of the traps spread, orders started pouring in from gardeners—and garden centers—all over the world. By the end of 2000, they’d sold sold more than $140,000 worth. But that was nothing: In 2001 they brought in more than $1.5 million.

PRODUCT
: Privacy Strips

BACKGROUND
: Attorney Jennifer Sloane of Winter Park, Florida, was tired of “shirt gap”—the openings between blouse buttons near the bustline. “It’s frustrating when you’re trying to project the image of a professional woman,” she told the
Orlando Business Journal
, “but your blouse becomes a distraction.” She decided to do something about it. In 2005, after a lot of experimentation with different glues, she came up with Privacy Strips, double-sided adhesive strips that you can stick to the inside of a blouse to invisibly hold the edges in place.

SUCCESS STORY
: Sloane convinced a local dry-cleaning chain to carry the products, then got national distributors interested and started a Web site that she handles at night after work. She sells Privacy Strips in packs of 10 for $2.99, and since starting out in 2005, she’s sold more than 100,000 packages.

PRODUCT
: Angel Guard

BACKGROUND
: In 2006, after Patricia Mandarino’s three-year-old daughter, Marilyn, managed to unbuckle the safety belt holding her child safety seat in place, the whole thing tumbled over when the car made a left turn. “I freaked out,” said the Spring Hill, Florida, mother. “I had no idea she could do that.” Mandarino couldn’t find a product designed to keep a toddler’s hands off seat-belts, so she decided to make one herself. A year later she came up with Angel Guard, a simple plastic device that fits over the seat-belt buckle to prevent child access to the release button, but still comes off easily for adults.

SUCCESS STORY
: Angel Guards went on sale in February 2007, and the simple invention made newspapers all over the country. In 2008 Target stores started carrying them, and Angel Guards became a huge financial—and safety—success.

PRODUCT
: The MuSmate

BACKGROUND
: One afternoon in 2006, Ken and Anne Armitage of Devon, England, were walking as fast as they could, trying to get to a pub on time. One problem: Anne has multiple sclerosis (MS), which makes walking difficult. (The disease makes it hard for her to lift one of her feet.) Ken, a geophysicist and part-time inventor, had an idea: He tied a strap around the shoe on Anne’s weak foot, tied a bungee cord from the shoe to her backpack—and off they went. The cord helped lift Anne’s foot with every step and made walking a lot easier. “I covered the last two kilometers and got there in time for tea,” she told reporters.

SUCCESS STORY
: Wanting to share their discovery, Anne and Ken invented the “MuSmate,” short for “muscle mate.” The user wears a shoulder harness (it can go on under a shirt) with an elastic cord that runs to a connector attached to their shoe. It improves walking distances for some people by up to 600%. The device has received glowing endorsements from MS treatment centers in England, and is now sold across the country. The FDA approved it in 2008, and the Armitages are attempting to market it worldwide, believing it can help people with MS, cerebral palsy, and stroke symptoms. “If my husband hadn’t invented this,” Anne says, “I would probably be using a wheelchair by now.”

We can’t verify the scientific accuracy of this story… but it’s a pretty entertaining Mexican folktale
.

L
AZY BOY
Once there lived a boy named Pablo. His home was in a deep valley near a tall mountain. Long, long before, the mountain had erupted and had spouted forth something magical on the land below, and because of this, crops grew fast on the farm where Pablo lived. If his father planted corn, the full-grown ears were ripe in a week. If pumpkin seeds were planted, the pumpkins had to be picked in a few days, otherwise they would become too heavy to carry. As for weeds—they were knee-high an hour after they had sprouted.

With things growing so fast, much work was necessary. But Pablo was very lazy. He liked to sleep, and he hated being out in the hot sun. Many times his father had to scold him before he would do any work. One hot afternoon he had to shake the boy hard in order to rouse him.

“You will get no supper until the hoeing is done!” he told Pablo.

So Pablo yawned and stretched, and went out to hoe the field. For an hour he did very well…but then he started to grow tired and sleepy. Sitting in the shade of a corn-stalk with his hoe and weeding knife at his side, he rested his head on a pumpkin. And in two minutes Pablo was asleep.

Pablo slept…and slept…and slept. And the cornstalk and pumpkin grew and grew. As the corn grew taller, the pumpkin vine became tangled around it and the pumpkin was lifted off the ground along with Pablo and the hoe and knife. But still Pablo slept.

The cornstalk grew taller and taller until no tree in the world could equal its height. It had produced many ears, and the seeds from some of them had sprouted and made still more ears of corn. Mean
while, the pumpkin had become many miles thick.

After a long time Pablo rubbed his eyes and sat up. What kind of world was this, he wondered. The ground was hard and yellow like a pumpkin. Corn was growing all around. He looked about him. His home was nowhere in sight. He couldn’t understand this, for it had been in plain view from the field.

He looked at his feet and saw that his trousers reached only to his knees. He couldn’t understand it—when he had put them on, they had come down to his ankles. His shirt-sleeves were short, too. His hair had grown down to his shoulders. Poor Pablo! He didn’t know what to think or do!

“How long have I been here?” Pablo asked himself.

He was hungry, so he ate some corn. He cut off a piece of the ground, and it tasted like pumpkin! He was fond of both corn and pumpkin, so his hunger was satisfied. Then he began to grow cold. In his pocket he had a piece of flint rock; with it he started a fire, using some dried cornstalks.

A long, long distance away, down on the Earth, a little girl stood in front of her home. It was dark, and she was gazing at something high above her. “Mother! Mother! she cried. “There is a round, shining ball in the sky! Come and look at it!” Her mother came, and the two watched the strange sight.

“Why, there is somebody on it!” exclaimed the mother. “I can see his face! He has a stick in his hand!”

“Yes,” replied the girl. “He is building a fire. I hope he does it every night.”

“We must not expect too much, Daughter,” the woman said. “Some nights he may need only a small fire and on others no fire at all. On those nights there won’t be much light in the sky, or perhaps none at all.”

“But I am glad to see the nice light,” said the girl. “It will make the nights brighter.”

“Suppose we give our new sky-friend a name and look for him tomorrow night,” suggested the mother. “What name shall it be?”

After the girl thought a minute, she answered, “Let’s call him the Moon!” And so it has been called ever since.

Why were the British roaming the Earth for centuries in search of empire? Maybe they were just searching for a decent meal. Here’s a taste of what they might have been running away from
.

B
UBBLE-AND-SQUEAK.
A mix of mashed potatoes and chopped cooked cabbage flattened into a layer in a hot skillet and cooked until browned. Supposedly gets its name from the bubbling and squeaking noises it makes while cooking.

COCK-A-LEEKIE
: Chicken soup made with leeks and a pound of prunes.

JELLIED EELS.
Eels that are cut up and cooked for a short time; the juices exuded during and after cooking become gelatinous as they cool. Served with vinegar.

CHIP BUTTIE
: It’s basically a french fry sandwich: well-salted “chips” drenched in malt vinegar (or brown sauce or tomato sauce) in between two slices of buttered white bread. Close relatives: the bacon buttie (strips of bacon with dollops of ketchup or brown sauce between slices of buttered toast) and the sugar buttie (white bread spread with salted butter and white sugar).

STEAK-AND-KIDNEY PIE.
A substantial dish of lean beef, veal kidneys, onions, mushrooms, and seasonings topped with a beef suet pastry crust, steamed in a pudding bowl. It’s usually served with Brussels sprouts and new potatoes. (Suet is solid white fat.)

BEANS ON TOAST
: Canned baked beans heated and poured over buttered white toast. Close relative: spaghetti on toast—canned spaghetti served hot on white toast.

TOAD-IN-THE-HOLE
: Fried sausages in Yorkshire pudding batter, baked until the batter puffs up.

PEASE PORRIDGE.
Dried split peas cooked until soft, then pureed with butter and eggs and steamed in a pudding bowl. It
thickens as it cools, so leftovers can be sliced and fried in more butter. This dish has been eaten in England since the 1500s.

STOTTY CAKE
: Flat, round yeast bread with a firm crust and a dense texture, usually split in half and filled with eggs and bacon or ham, or with pease porridge.
Stott
means “throw.” According to legend, bakers would toss the baked breads onto the floor, and if they didn’t bounce too much, they were done.

STARGAZY PIE
: A Cornish tradition, in which small whole fishes are arranged in a pie as if they were the spokes of a wheel—tails in the center and heads sticking out of the top crust all around the rim, presumably to gaze up at the stars.

NEEPS AND TATTIES
: Mashed turnips and creamed potatoes, traditionally served as side dishes with haggis. Mashed turnips are also called bashed neeps. Neep bree is cooked turnips, butter, and ginger pureed with milk.

SPOTTED DICK.
A dessert pudding made of flour, beef suet, currants or raisins (those are the spots), sugar, spices, and either water or milk. The doughy mixture is shaped into a cylinder, tied into a pudding cloth, and boiled for a couple of hours. Served with custard sauce.

PLUM PUDDING
: There are no plums in this Christmas treat—it’s raisins, beef suet, candied fruit, breadcrumbs, almonds, and spices. It’s often served with brandy butter (butter, sugar, and brandy, spooned onto the warm pudding, where it melts).

JAM ROLY-POLY
: Another dessert pudding. It starts with a dough made of flour, shredded suet, and milk; rolled out; spread with jam; and rolled up like a jelly roll. It’s then wrapped in cloth or foil and steamed for an hour. Nickname: “dead man’s arm.”