Read Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader Online
Authors: Michael Brunsfeld
The Good News:
Though the infant-dog wedding is considered as real as a wedding between a normal bride and groom, when the girl grows up she is free to marry again, without having to divorce the dog.
THE CURSE OF LADY MACDOUGALL
Background:
One Sunday morning in the 1550s, members of the MacCallum clan gathered at their church in Kilbride, Scotland, for Sunday Mass. Members of the MacDougall clan also attended services there, but by the time they arrived the church was so full of MacCallums that there was no place for them to sit.
Cursed!
It made Lady MacDougall so mad that she put a curse on the MacCallum clan: the sons and their descendants would die unless they moved off the family farm at Cologin.
The twelve MacCallum brothers who lived on the Cologin farm ignored the curse…until, one by one, over the next few years, nine of them died. The surviving three got the message—they moved off the farm and their descendants survive to this day. The story of the curse, which was never lifted, has been passed down in both clans for more than 400 years.
Update:
Finally in July 2002, American members of the two clans met at the annual Highland Games at Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina and performed a “lifting of the curse” ceremony in front of the beer tent (there was no church handy). Just as they had done in the 16th century, a group of MacCallums blocked the entrance. But this time, when the MacDougalls tried to enter, the MacCallums parted and let them pass.
* * *
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World’s deepest valley: the Yarlung Zangbu Valley in Tibet (average depth: 16,400 feet).
Sometimes ad campaigns do more than sell a product—sometimes they make us laugh
.
T
he R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company tried to market Salem cigarettes in Japan using the American slogan “Salem—Feeling Free.” They had to change it: it translated into Japanese as “When smoking Salem, you feel so refreshed that your mind seems to be empty.”
• Swedish furniture manufacturer IKEA issued an apology after it advertised its children’s “Gutvik” bunk beds in Christmas catalogs in Germany. Reason: In German,
Gutvik
translates into an explicit sexual reference. (G
ut
means “good”—you’ll have to figure out the rest.) An IKEA spokeswoman explained that “Gutvik is the name of a tiny Swedish town. We didn’t realize that it could also be taken as something obscene.”
• Family and religious groups in Michigan protested a series of beer ads that appeared on billboards in 2004. Sechs Beer put up ads with messages like “As long as you’re 21, it’s OK to pay for Sechs” and “It’s OK to have Sechs by yourself.” The brewer, Walton Sechs Brewery of Wisconsin, explained that
sechs
is the German word for “six” and refused to remove the billboards.
• Dirt Cheap Cigarettes & Beer, a store in Fenton, Missouri, runs commercials on late-night television. They feature a man dressed as a chicken running around the store yelling, “Cheap cheap fun fun!” while the owner tells male viewers that they should buy beer from him because “the more she drinks, the better you’ll look.”
• In 2004, WCAT, a country music radio station in Pennsylvania, changed its format. They announced the change by playing the children’s song “Pop Goes the Weasel” non-stop, 24 hours a day, for four straight days. After the four days, CAT Country was gone, and Cool Pop 106.7—a pop-music station—was born.
• Family members of the late Johnny Cash refused to allow one of Cash’s signature songs to be used for a TV commercial. Producer Sula Miller wanted to use the song “Ring of Fire” in a commercial for a hemorrhoid medication.
Nancy Green was the first living person whose image was trademarked…as Aunt Jemima.
In our
Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader,
we told you how football started. Well, halftime is over. (We hope you enjoyed the show.) Here’s the story of the very first pro football player
.
C
OLLEGE GAME
Football was invented at Ivy League colleges in the 1870s, combining rugby with some other ball games popular at the time. For more than 50 years the college game was the dominant form of the sport, both in terms of the number of teams and the number of fans. College football
was
football. But what about people who didn’t go to college, or grads that wanted to relive their glory days? They wanted to play, too, and they wanted teams they could root for. So in the 1890s local sports clubs and businesses began to organize teams.
These sports clubs, such as the YMCA, had an agenda: their members saw them as stepping-stones to get into even more exclusive clubs and a great way to do that was to belong to a club with a successful sports team. So the pressure was on from the beginning to recruit the best men possible.
One problem: it was against the rules to pay athletes for playing. Amateurism was seen as a noble quality; getting paid to play was seen as crass. So instead of breaking the rules, the clubs bent them. San Francisco’s Olympic Athletic Club, for example, promised to find a job for any athlete that joined the club. Even if this didn’t technically violate the rules, it certainly violated the spirit of amateurism. But the practice was so widespread that, rather than condemn it, in 1890 the Amateur Athletic Union, which governed amateur clubs, created an entirely new category for that kind of athlete—the “semiprofessional.”
LORD OF THE RINGERS
William “Pudge” Heffelfinger was a former All-American for Yale University. One of the best players of his time, Heffelfinger was famous for hurling himself over the heads of interlocked offensive linemen and cannonballing knee-first into the ball carrier’s chest. (Needless to say, the rules of football were quite different back then.)
Botulism bacteria are so toxic that one pound could kill every human on Earth.
A popular practice at the time was to cheat by hiring ringers, skilled college players who posed as average Joes and played under assumed names. Heffelfinger was sorely needed by two rival clubs in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: the Allegheny Athletic Association and the Pittsburgh Athletic Club. After playing to a 6–6 tie in the citywide championship game in October 1892 (highly contested because Allegheny had stolen some of Pittsburgh’s best players), a rematch was set for three weeks later. Both clubs scrambled to field the best teams possible; both clubs secretly met with Heffelfinger.
GAME DAY
More than 3,000 people turned out for the rematch on November 12, even though it was snowing. The Allegheny crowd cheered when Pudge took the field with their team. The Pittsburgh side cried foul—Allegheny was using
ringers
, after all. They refused to play unless Allegheny agreed that all bets placed on the game were off. (Gambling was another big part of the early game.) After nearly an hour, Allegheny agreed.
For all the hoopla that led up to it, the game itself was pretty uneventful. Pudge scored the only touchdown, and Allegheny won 4–0 (back then, a touchdown only counted for four points—today it counts for six). Even with the low score and the bitterly cold weather, the crowd was entertained by the brutal play and carnage on the field. Several players were injured—three had to be carried off on stretchers.
Today, Pudge Heffelfinger is just a footnote in professional football. He wouldn’t even be that, were it not for a single scrap of paper that survived among the Allegheny Athletic Association’s financial records for the 1892 season. Today that scrap of paper—an expense sheet for the November 12 game—is on display in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. On it is an entry showing that, in addition to being reimbursed for his expenses, Heffelfinger received a $500 “game performance bonus for playing.” And in those days, $500 was about what a schoolteacher made in a year. Although neither Pudge nor Allegheny ever admitted to the transaction, the expense sheet speaks for itself: Heffelfinger was the first documented professional football player in the history of the game.
Cut left and go long to
page 221
for “The Birth of the NFL.
”
It takes 630 silkworm cocoons to make a single silk blouse.
Recent studies have found that professional musicians often suffer from some very real—but very odd—ailments. Here are a few
.
F
IDDLER’S NECK
The name might sound silly, but according to a study of regular violin and viola players by Dr. Thilo Gambichler of Old-church Hospital in London, the friction of the instrument’s base against the left side of the neck (for right-handed players) can cause lesions, severe inflammation, and cysts. What’s worse, said the study, published in the British medical journal
BMC Dermatology
, it causes
lichenification
—the development of a patch of thick, leathery skin on the neck, giving it a “bark-like” appearance.
GUITAR NIPPLE
A similar report issued in the United States cited three female classical guitarists who suffered from
traumatic mastitis
—swelling of the breast and nipple area—due to prolonged friction from the instrument’s body. The condition can strike male players, too.
BAGPIPER’S FUNGUS
Recent medical reports have detailed the dangers of playing Scotland’s national instrument. Bagpipes are traditionally made of sheepskin coated with a molasses-like substance called treacle. That, the report said, is a perfect breeding ground for various fungi, such as
aspergillus
and
cryptococcus
. Bagpipers can inadvertently inhale fungal spores, which, according to Dr. Robert Sataloff of Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, can lead to deadly lung—and even brain—diseases.
TUBA LIPS
Many long-term tuba players develop an allergic reaction to nickel, an ingredient in brass. The allergy can result in dermatitis of the lips and can sometimes develop into chronic eczema. Strictly speaking, the condition can also affect the chin and hands, and can be contracted from any number of brass instruments (but “tuba lips” is more fun to say).
Q: What performer had over 100 albums make the
Billboard
Top 40? A: Elvis Presley.
“Happiness is a good quote page.” —Uncle John
“Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.”
—Albert Schweitzer
“Happiness is perfume you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on yourself.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.”
—Allan K. Chalmers, artist
“Happiness is a Swedish sunset—it is there for all, but most of us look the other way and lose it.”
—Mark Twain
“Happiness is your dentist telling you it won’t hurt and then having him catch his hand in the drill.”
—Johnny Carson
“Happiness is unrepentant pleasure.”
—Socrates
“Happiness is a wine of the rarest vintage, and seems insipid to a vulgar taste.”
—Logan Pearsall Smith
“Happiness is a way station between too little and too much.”
—Channing Pollock
“Happiness is as a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but which if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Happiness, at my age, is breathing.”
—Joan Rivers
“Happiness is never stopping to think if you are.”
—Palmer Sondreal
“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”
—Mohandas K. Gandhi
“The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.”
—J. D. Salinger
“Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.”
—Hosea Ballou, minister
Abraham Lincoln and Paul Revere were distant relatives.
Readers sometimes ask if we’ll ever run out of things to write about. No way. Origins are a good example: as we recently discovered, even lowly snack foods can have fascinating (and delicious) origins
.
S
NACK
In 1943 Ignacio Anaya, or “Nacho” as he was nicknamed, was working as the maitre d’ at a restaurant called the Victory Club in Piedras Negras, Mexico, just across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas. According to Anaya’s son, Ignacio Jr., one night the restaurant’s cook disappeared just as a group of officers’ wives from Fort Duncan Air Base arrived for dinner. Thinking fast, Anaya went into the kitchen and improvised a meal by taking some tostadas and topping them with shredded cheddar cheese, then putting them in a broiler, and serving them garnished with jalapeño peppers. The women were impressed. One of them, Mamie Finan, named them “Nachos Especiales” in honor of Anaya’s nickname.