Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (51 page)

Warning:
Guitarlets, Screamers, and P-anos are
not
advised for struggling musicians whose careers are
already
in the toilet.

Take packaged snack food…and turn it into something else with one of these weird recipes. (Warning to healthy eaters: DON’T LOOK!)

• Twinkie Sushi.
Cut Twinkies into inch-long pieces and wrap them in strips of green Fruit Roll-Ups. The result looks like sushi. Serve with dried mango strips (which look like pickled ginger).

• Pringles Candy.
Mix three cups of crushed Pringles potato chips into a melted package of almond bark. Stir in a cup of Spanish peanuts. Pour onto wax paper; cool, dry, and break into pieces.

• Kool-Aid Pickles.
Soak some dill pickles in a pitcher filled with equal parts vinegar and cherry or tropical punch-flavored Kool-Aid. The result is a pickle that’s sweet, sour…and bright red.

• Chicken McBigMac.
Not getting enough meat in your diet? Try this: Buy a McDonald’s Big Mac and three McChicken sandwiches. Remove the three bun slices on the Big Mac and replace them with the fried McChicken chicken patties.

• Coke Seafood Au Gratin.
Combine two tablespoons of butter and two of flour. On low heat, add in a cup of milk and a half cup of grated parmesan. As it thickens, add a half cup of Coca-Cola. Pour the sauce over a half pound each of cooked shrimp, crab, lobster, and sole. Top with bread crumbs and bake for 20 minutes.

•
Peppers With Creamy Sauce.
Remove the seeds from six green (or red) bell peppers that have been cut in half. Melt a package of marshmallows. Fill the peppers with the creamy marshmallow sauce and bake until brown.

•
Funyun Onion Rings.
Grind a bag of Funyons in a blender. (Funyuns are made from cornmeal that’s formed into rings and heavily seasoned with onion powder.) Dip slices of real onions in the Funyun crumbs, then dip in egg whites and cook in a deep-fryer.

•
Maple Bacon Donut.
If you like bacon with your waffles and you’ve ever dipped the bacon in maple syrup, you’ll love this simple treat: Take a maple bar (a donut with maple frosting, also known as a maple longjohn) and place two strips of extra-crispy bacon on top…and hope you have good health insurance.

A few more tips on how to get the most bang for your buck when you’re buying gas for your car. (Part I is on page 202.)

D
ON’T EVEN
THINK
ABOUT IT
A lot of us have dreamed of doing it: One of the most tempting ways to save gas may be to simply shut off the engine anytime you’re traveling downhill. Even if you’ve felt the urge to do it, don’t—driving with the engine off can be very dangerous, not to mention illegal in many states, and can even do thousands of dollars of damage to your car. How?

• Many automatic transmissions are lubricated by a pump that is powered by the car’s engine. If you turn off the engine while the car is moving, you can severely damage the transmission.

• Power steering and power brakes also rely on the engine for their power. Once the engine has been shut off, your car’s steering will become very stiff, and so will the brakes after just a few pumps of the brake pedal. In an older car, you also risk damaging the distributor. So if you’re in your car and it’s moving, leave the engine on.

Are you old enough to remember the oil crisis of the 1970s, and the fanciful tales of VW Beetles “drafting”—another word for tailgating—so closely behind 18-wheeler trucks that drivers could put their cars in neutral, shut off the engine, and be sucked down the road by the big rigs? This is an urban legend that can get you killed, with the added insult that your gas savings, if any, would be negligible. Don’t tailgate big rigs and other large vehicles under
any
circumstances. It’s illegal, ineffective, and very dangerous. You’ll save a lot more gas just by slowing down, and that increases your safety as well.

The minimum safe distance behind any vehicle is the distance that gives you at least three seconds of reaction time in an emergency. At highway speeds that can be as much as 150 feet. You’re probably too close already—stay back!

• Automobiles that are already warmed up operate more efficiently than cars that are cold, if for no other reason than cars are designed to run on a richer mixture of fuel and air until they are warmed up. Note: this
doesn’t
mean you need to let your car sit and idle until it’s warm. Warming up in your driveway before starting off can actually be counterproductive. It makes more sense to start driving as soon as the engine is running smoothly, which in most cars, especially newer ones, means almost immediately. The drivetrain (all the parts that transmit the power from the engine to the wheels) also needs to warm up to work efficiently. Believe it or not, so do the tires. The fastest way to warm everything up: Start driving.

• The improved efficiency of warmed-up cars is one of the reasons that stringing all of your errands together into one long trip can save gas. In addition to driving fewer miles by making one big trip instead of several shorter ones, you can save as much as 4 mpg by running the bulk of your errands in a car that’s already warmed up rather than one that starts each trip cold.

Air conditioners get blamed for using a lot of gas. So does rolling down the windows of a car that’s traveling at highway speeds, on the theory that a car with its windows rolled down has more aerodynamic drag than one that has them rolled up.

• Turns out there is some truth to the air conditioner claim—in one test by
Consumer Reports
magazine, a Toyota Camry traveling at 65 mph lost about 1 mpg of fuel economy when the air conditioner was turned on.

• But there’s no truth to the claim that rolling down your car’s windows harms its fuel economy. When
Consumer Reports
rolled down the windows of their test Camry at 65 mph, they didn’t notice any change in fuel mileage at all. So roll down your windows to your heart’s content, and use the air conditioner if you need to—it’s not using as much gas as you might have thought.

• Anytime your engine is running and your car isn’t moving, you
are getting 0 mpg. If you expect to be idling for 10 seconds or more, shutting off the engine—provided that it’s safe to do so—will save fuel. It also helps to avoid situations where you might spend a lot of time idling, such as at the drive-up window of a fast food restaurant.

• If you drive an automatic, you probably know that when you’re stopped and the car is in drive, your foot on the brake is the only thing stopping the engine from slowly pushing the car forward. Whenever you’re going to be stopped for more than a few seconds, shift the car into neutral and you’ll save a little gas. If you’re worried about forgetting to shift back to drive, keeping your hand on the shifter will help you remember.

• Another simple trick: if you’re like Uncle John, you’re occasionally guilty of the practice of starting your car as soon as you get in it and then spending 30 seconds or more fastening your seat belt, adjusting the mirrors, tuning the radio to your station, and so on. You can save gas by taking care of this stuff
before
starting the car.

• Anytime you have two or more lanes to choose from, figure out which one is the “lane of least resistance” and get in it. The lane of least resistance is the hypermiler’s term for the one that requires the least amount of braking or changes in speed, which over time can make a big dent in your fuel economy. On a street where lots of cars are turning right into driveways or parking lots, stay in the left lane. If a lot of cars are stopping in the left lane to make left turns, move into the right lane. On a three-lane street, the lane in the middle is often the clearest.

• Taking back roads, where the speed limits are lower and there are fewer cars around, gives you the flexibility to drive efficiently in ways that aren’t possible on busy streets or highways. Just getting out of stop-and-go traffic will improve your gas mileage, and you may save gas even if the backroads route is a little longer.

• In the winter, any snow on the ground can provide extra rolling resistance to your car, requiring you to use more gas than would be necessary if there were no snow on the road. Because of this, the
most fuel-efficient time to drive is right after the road has been plowed, if you can wait until then.

• If your car is covered in snow, clear off as much as you can before you start driving. All that snow can add a lot of weight to the car, and if it’s piled up on the roof it can also make the car less aerodynamic. It also cuts down the time you need the electric defroster, which uses a lot of energy.

• Water on the road also increases rolling resistance. For this reason, hypermilers like to practice something known as “ridge riding.” If the road has water collecting in tire tracks worn into the road surface, driving just to the left or the right of these ruts—provided the lane is wide enough and it is safe to do so—takes you out of the water onto a part of the road surface that offers less resistance.

• If you drive an automatic, when you take your foot off the brake, pause just a second before stepping on the accelerator, to give the transmission a chance to start the car moving. It takes less energy to accelerate your car once it is already moving.

• Coasting in situations where it’s appropriate can save gas, too. Keep a close eye on the brake lights of the cars ahead of you as well as the traffic lights in approaching intersections. Anytime you see brake lights flash or a green light turn to yellow, and you know you are going to have to brake soon, it’s more fuel efficient for you to take your foot off the accelerator immediately and coast until you need to apply the brakes. Your car uses less gas when your foot is off the accelerator. Once you know you’re going to have to stop, it’s wasteful to continue accelerating right up to the point where you do need to brake.

• Some fuel-saving techniques that work fine when you’re alone on the road or in very light traffic, such as driving below the posted speed limit or coasting slowly up to red lights in the hope that they’ll turn green before you come to a complete stop, can be counterproductive on busier roads, even if you don’t take road rage and potential collisions into consideration.
You
may be saving gas, but by disrupting the flow of traffic around you, you may also be causing
other
drivers to waste more gas than you’re saving.

Imagine you're watching TV when suddenly…the screen scrambles and somebody else appears on-screen, hijacking the signal. Despite the technological sophistication of TV broadcasting, it's actually happened quite a few times
.

C
APTAIN MIDNIGHT
The Crime:
On April 27, 1986, HBO was showing the movie
The Falcon and the Snowman
on the East Coast. Suddenly, the movie disappeared, replaced by a color bar test pattern. Over the color bars was a message in white text that read:

“Good Evening HBO from Captain Midnight. $12.95/month? No way! Showtime/Movie Channel Beware!”

The message remained on-screen for four minutes. Then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, the message went away and
The Falcon and the Snowman
returned. HBO (and the government) had no idea how it could have happened—every person and every piece of equipment in its operations were accounted for—until an anonymous caller contacted the FBI a few weeks later.

The Aftermath:
The tipster was calling from a phone booth in Gainesville, Florida, where he’d met a guy named John Mac-Dougall in a local bar and heard him brag about breaking into HBO’s feed. MacDougall was promptly arrested…and he confessed. Why’d he do it? MacDougall was a satellite dish salesman frustrated by HBO’s requiring satellite owners to buy extra equipment to access its channel, which, along with high subscription fees, hurt his business. So, while working his second job as a satellite uplink supervisor at Central Florida Teleport, he intercepted the HBO signal and broadcast his message. MacDougall was fined $5,000 and sentenced to a year of probation. (He still sells satellite dishes.)

The Crime:
East Coast viewers who tuned in to the Playboy Channel on the night of September 6, 1987, didn’t get the movie they’d paid for—they got a guilt trip instead. For six minutes, the broadcast was replaced by a black screen with a message in white text that said simply, “Repent your sins.”

The Aftermath:
Within just a few days of the signal’s being hijacked, the FBI determined that the message text was produced with a Knox K50 Character Generator, of which only five were in use in the United States. One of those was located at the Virginia headquarters of the Christian Broadcasting Network, the religious television company that produces
The 700 Club
. Confronted by the FBI, a CBN employee named Thomas Haynie proudly admitted that he was the hijacker. Haynie had access to CBN’s satellite, which he used to intercept the Playboy Channel’s transmission with the intent to “instill morality.” Haynie was fired by CBN, paid a $1,000 fine, and received three years of probation. (When his sentence was up, CBN re-hired him.)