Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader (71 page)

FOOD SUPERSTITIONS

What can you do with food besides eat it? Drive evil spirits away, of course! People actually used to believe in these bizarre rituals
.

Bake your cakes while the sun is rising, and do not throw away the eggshells until the baking is done.

Tossing coffee grounds under steps leading to the kitchen will rid the home of ants.

If you don’t spit out the seeds while eating a grape, the seeds will give you appendicitis.

Hold a buttercup under someone’s chin. If it casts a yellow shadow, that person loves to eat butter.

The sound of thunder will turn milk sour.

Hammer a peg or nail into a fruit tree that bears no fruit, and soon you will have some.

Tipping over a slice of cake on a plate while serving a guest is a sign of bad luck.

If you want your cabbages to flourish, plant them on St. Patrick’s Day.

Two yolks in an Easter egg is a good omen—you will be rich someday.

If you spot bubbles in a cup of coffee, try to spoon them up and eat them before they burst. If you succeed, you will receive money from an unexpected source.

It’s bad luck to gather blackberries after October 11.

If you love someone and want them to love you, give them an orange.

Onions mixed with ant eggs will cure deafness.

Eating the last piece of bread on a plate is bad luck—it will cause a bachelor to marry, or an unmarried woman to stay unmarried.

Rum poured on the head cures baldness.

Bananas must be broken apart—never cut with a knife. Cutting brings bad luck.

Eating peaches gives you wisdom.

If you grow too much lettuce in your garden, your wife will never conceive children.

There are 24 flowers on every Oreo cookie.

KING OF CANADA

If politicians were awarded points for weirdness, there’d be plenty of competition…but this guy would win
.

B
LAND MASTER

William Lyon Mackenzie King was Canada’s longest-serving prime minister, leading Canada through most of the Great Depression and all of World War II.

Born in 1874 in Kitchener, Ontario, King studied law and economics at the University of Toronto and Chicago University. Inspired to go into government service by his mother’s tales of his grandfather, the rebel William Lyon Mackenzie, King became an astute politician and leader who made many lasting contributions to Canadian history.

In public he was an average-looking man who favored black suits with starched white collars. According to
Canada: A People’s History
, King was “dull, reliable and largely friendless.” When talking to the press or in Parliament, King was deliberately vague and opaque.

“It was hard to pin him down, to use his own words against him…because his speeches were masterpieces of ambiguity,” writes Canadian historian Pierre Berton. To the public he was a master politician and a symbol of stability.

But the public didn’t know about his private life.

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

In those days, a politician’s private life really was private. Good thing for King, because behind his neutral facade, he was a first-class eccentric.

King never married, and in fact, seemed terrified of all women—except his mother. No woman, notes Berton, “could hope to compare for beauty, compassion, selflessness, purity of soul with his mother, who haunted his dreams…guiding his destinies, consoling him in his darker moments and leaving precious little time or space for a rival.”

Isabel King continued to control her son even after her death. Long after she passed away, King held séances and regularly chatted with his mother’s “spirit” about matters of state.

Diamonds will not dissolve in acid.

He liked to speak with other deceased figures as well. “He spent a lot of time communicating with departed relatives and the famous dead,” states
Canada: A People’s History
. “In 1934, he returned from Europe, having made friends with Leonardo da Vinci, a member of the de’Medici family, Louis Pasteur, and Philip the Apostle.” He also contacted Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier, British prime minister William Gladstone, Saint Luke, Saint John, Robert Louis Stevenson, and his grandfather.

BAD RAP

King owned a crystal ball, but that’s not how he contacted the spirit world. He had a special séance table through which spirits “spoke” to him by rapping out messages that he alone could decipher. Unfortunately, the messages weren’t always accurate.

On September 2, 1939—one day after Nazi Germany invaded Poland to start World War II—King held a séance in which his dead father told him Hitler had been assassinated. The prime minister was greatly disappointed when he discovered this wasn’t true.

King vastly underestimated the dangers posed by fascist leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini. After visiting Nazi Germany in the 1930s, King decided that Hitler was okay because he allegedly shared certain personality traits with the Canadian P.M. “I am convinced Hitler is a spiritualist,” King wrote. “His devotion to his mother—that Mother’s spirit is, I am certain, his guide.”

King also dabbled in numerology and the reading of tea leaves, and held lengthy policy chats with his dog, an Irish terrier named Pat, to whom he liked to outline issues of national importance. (It’s unclear what advice, if any, Pat offered in return.) He reportedly made decisions on national issues based on the position of the hands of the clock, as a vote was being taken in Parliament.

CAN’T KEEP A SECRET

How do we know so much about King’s private life today? He kept extensive diaries. He left explicit instructions that after his death for his butler to burn the diaries. But instead of burning them, the butler read them. Now they reside in Canada’s National Archives.

What’s the only food that provides calories with no nutrition? Sugar.

CHAN THE MAN

As a kid, Uncle John spent many Saturday afternoons glued to the tube watching corny old B-movies featuring the white-suited Chinese detective, Charlie Chan. Though considered politically incorrect today, they’re still on TV…and they’re still corny
.

T
HE MAN BEHIND CHAN

Charlie Chan has cast a portly shadow across the world of detective fiction since his creation in 1925. The wise and charming Oriental sleuth was the brainchild of a novelist and playwright from Warren, Ohio, named Earl Derr Biggers. Biggers got the idea for the character while on a visit to Honolulu in 1919, where he happened to read an article about real-life Chinese detective Chang Apana.

Charlie Chan debuted as a minor character in Bigger’s novel
House Without a Key
, which was serialized for the
Saturday Evening Post
magazine and then turned into a silent movie in 1926. Readers loved Chan, so Biggers immediately wrote another story, this one with the Chinese detective in the lead. Then, for the next five years, Biggers wrote a new Charlie Chan novel every year.

CAN UNDERSTAND CHAN GRAND PLAN

Biggers died in 1933, but his character lived on. Forty-five Charlie Chan films were produced by Twentieth Century Fox and then Monogram Studios during the 1930s and 1940s. The plots all followed the same formula: Charlie Chan, the world famous detective, would stumble upon a murder case in some exotic place like Paris, Cairo, or Monte Carlo. One or two of his sons—identified in chronological order as “Number One Son” and “Number Two Son”—would offer “Pop” their help. For the rest of the movie, these young detective wannabes would get in the way until Chan solved the case in spite of them. And along the way, he would offer numerous pearls of pithy Chinese wisdom.

ONE CHAN, MANY MAN

Six different actors played the Chinese detective on-screen, but amazingly, none of them were Chinese. Warner Oland, probably the best-known and most popular, was Swedish. But Oland’s heritage included some Mongolian blood, which is possibly what allowed him to pass for Asian on the screen when he added a moustache and goatee. In real life, Oland often spoke in stilted speech and referred to himself as “Humble Father,” which gave some people the impression that he actually thought he
was
Charlie Chan.

Chinese fishermen train otters to herd fish into their nets.

After making 16 Chan films, Warner Oland died in 1938, but once again, Chan was too popular (and valuable) to die. Sidney Toler took his place, doing 22 more movies.

When Toler died in 1947, Roland Winters became Chan. Of all the Chans, Winters was the worst cast—he had a large nose and blonde hair. He tried to look Chinese by squinting and always insisted on being shot from the front so audiences wouldn’t see his Caucasian profile. If he needed to speak to anyone at his side, he simply moved his eyes to the right or left. Winters made the last Chan film in the series,
The Sky Dragon
, in 1949.

MORE CHAN, MANY FAN

The franchise extended to radio, too. Walter Connolly and Ed Begley, both Caucasians, played Charlie Chan on a show sponsored by Esso. The radio show ran from 1932 until 1948.

On television,
The New Adventures of Charlie Chan
premiered in 1957 and lasted less than a year. In the lead role was J. Carroll Naish, another Caucasian. In 1971 a made-for-TV movie,
Happiness Is a Warm Clue
, starred Ross Martin (he was Caucasian, too).

The last Charlie Chan movie, a parody called
The Curse of the Dragon Queen
, was made in 1981. It starred (non-Asian) Peter Ustinov as the detective. While in production, Chinese-American groups protested the film and several Asian-American extras were added to the cast.

EPILOGUE

More than 75 years after his first appearance, Charlie Chan lives on. Biggers’s novels have never gone out of print, and more than 40 of his movies regularly play on cable television. As Chan says, “Impossible to miss someone who will always be in heart.”

There are more varieties of orchid than of any other flower (30,000 at last count).

CHANISMS

For a fictional detective, Charlie Chan was pretty wise
.

“If you want wild bird to sing do not put him in cage.”

“Owner of face cannot always see nose.”

“Hasty conclusion like gunpowder—easy to explode.”

“Grain of sand in eye may hide mountain.”

“You talk like rooster, who thinks sun come up just to hear him crow.”

“If strength were all, tiger would not fear scorpion.”

“Questions are keys to door of truth.”

“Only foolish man waste words when argument is lost.”

“Man who flirt with dynamite sometime fly with angels.”

“Every Maybe has wife called Maybe-Not.”

“When money talks, few are deaf.”

“Cannot believe piece of carved stone contain evil until dropped on foot.”

“Trouble, like first love, teach many lessons.”

“Advice after mistake is like medicine after dead man’s funeral.”

“Waiting for tomorrow—waste of today.”

“When friend asks, friend gives.”

“Every man must wear out at least one pair of fool’s shoes.”

“When doing good deed, remember kind-hearted elephant who tried to help hen hatch chicks.”

“Cat who tries to catch two mice at one time goes without supper.”

“Good idea not to accept gold medal until race is won.”

“Man who seek trouble never find it far off.”

“Humbly suggest not to judge wine by barrel it is in.”

“Words cannot cook rice.”

“Cannot tell where path lead until reach end of road.”

That’s a mouthful:
Linguine
means “little tongues” in Italian.

JUMPING FOR JOY

The origin of the trampoline is just the kind of story we love at the BRI: one man’s dream and persistence creates something that millions of people have benefited from
.

S
KIN-SPIRATION

As a typical teenage boy in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in the 1920s, George Nissen loved the circus. He was most fascinated with the acrobats—the way they would gracefully fall into the large nets from the high wire, sometimes doing amazing tricks and twists as they bounced. Nissen also loved vaudeville acts. One of the gags he liked best was the springboard. A man would be pushed off the stage into the orchestra pit, only to “magically” bounce back up onto the stage. He wanted to do that! When Nissen read in a high school textbook that Eskimos sometimes stretched walrus skins between stakes in the ground and then bounced up and down on them just for fun, that did it—he decided to make his own “jumping table.”

Still in high school, Nissen started his project in 1926. He scavenged materials from the local dump and tinkered away in his garage…for 10 years. In that time he had become a world-class tumbler, winning the National Championship three times in a row, from 1935 to 1937. It was around this same time that Nissen was putting the final touches on his new invention. With the assistance of a local gymnastics coach named Larry Griswold, Nissen used rails from a bed, some strips of inner tube, tightly wound rope, and canvas to build his first jumping table. He called it the trampoline, from the Spanish word
trampolín
, which means “springboard.” They took it to the local YMCA, where Nissen worked as an instructor to test-market it. The kids loved it—they stood in long lines for a chance to jump on the new contraption.

BOUNCING BACK

The trampoline became so popular in Cedar Rapids that Nissen began mass-producing them in 1938. One problem: no one bought them. Why? Nissen believed that even though the trampoline intrigued them, people saw it as something only for circus performers.
So he strapped a trampoline to the top of his car and took off cross-country, giving exhibitions anywhere a crowd was gathered—schools, fairs, playgrounds, and sporting events.