Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader (102 page)

—“Boys from the City. Not yet caught by the Whirlwind of Progress. Feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs.”

• The “‘exciting’ car chase...” How many inconsistencies can
you
find? Here’s Ken Begg’s (Jabootu’s) analysis:

The scene immediately cuts from daytime to nighttime. Plus the scenery keeps changing (when the film isn’t so dark that you can’t see what’s going on). First, they’re driving through a forest. Then the desert. Then they’re still in the desert, but on a road. Then on a road bordered by mountains. Then on a road where the other side’s bordered by mountains. This goes on for some minutes. They drive past a plywood sign obviously made for the film (by somebody’s kid, by the look of it) that reads “Yucca Flats.” (Wow!)

THE CRAWLING EYE (1958)

Starring Forrest Tucker, Janet Munro, Laurence Payne, Jennifer Jayne, Warren Mitchell

The Plot:
A mysterious radioactive cloud covers Mt. Trollenberg in the Swiss Alps. Meanwhile, mountain climbers are turning up decapitated. What’s going on? United Nations investigator Alan Brooks is sent to find out. He and his psychic girlfriend Anne (who “slips in and out of unintentionally hilarious trances”) discover “giant paper mache eyeballs with ultra-cheap tentacles,” er, space aliens who want to take over our planet. Brooks finally figures out that the creatures like it cold, and gets rid of them with the help of a few “U.N. fire bombs” (molotov cocktails and napalm!).

Sleepwalking is hereditary.

Commentary:

From “Rotten Tomatoes”
(Dennis Schwartz):

“May be a good film to see on late night cable TV while you’re hoisting a few at the bar. In fact, every character in the film has either a brandy or a Scotch to drink at some time—when they’re shook up or about to climb the mountain...or just to be sociable. So they might know something about this film [we] don't—such as, it might be best to have a few nips while viewing to enhance the “quality” of the film. Not that I’m an advocate of drinking, but what the hell...it can’t hurt in this case.”

From “The Bad Movie Report”:

• “This film had a couple of things going for it, not least of which was that Anne is really attractive. Unfortunately they made this movie in 1958 so she dresses like June Cleaver....

• “Things I learned from this movie:

—Villagers have something to say about everything

—Clouds that are stationary and radioactive are bad news

—Foreboding music does not belong in a scene involving empty beds

—Do not open a [backpack] that is just lying around on a mountainside; odds are there’s a head in it

—Zombies created by freezing aliens melt away when killed.”

BONUS: Scene to Watch For.
“As the villagers flee to the observatory, a child of about four somehow manages to cover what appears to be several miles in a matter of minutes to retrieve her ball. This scene is obviously contrived so that (a) we can get our first look at the enemy and (b) Forrest Tucker can do a manly rescue in the very nick.” —
Elizabeth Burton

Military spending: Among other things, the U.S. military operates 234 golf courses.

We included Mark Twain quotes in the original
Bathroom Reader.
There are so many good ones, we couldn’t resist including a few more
.

“Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.”

“Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.”

“The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”

“It is easier to stay out than get out.”

“In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practise. Then he made school boards.”

“To eat is human. To digest divine.”

“Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.”

“If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.”

“I am different from Washington; I have a higher, grander standard of principle. Washington could not lie. I
can
lie, but I won’t.”

“Few things are harder to put up with than a good example.”

“Heaven goes by favour. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.”

“There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate: when he can’t afford it and when he can.”

“Modesty died when clothes were born.”

“We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.”

“Never learn to do anything. If you don’t learn, you’ll always find someone else to do it for you.”

Four health clinics around the world specialize in bad breath. (Two are in Philadelphia.)

Here are a few more words we all use—and where they come from...

O
rangutan:
From a Malay phrase that means “man of the forest.”

Candidate
: In ancient Rome a
candidatus
was “a person clothed in white.” Roman politicians wore white togas to symbolize “humility and purity of motive.”

Idiot:
From the Greek word
idiotes
, which means “private people” or “people who do not hold public office.”

Outlandish:
Described the unfamiliar behavior of foreigners, also known as
outlanders
.

Eleven:
The Germanic ancestor of the word,
ain-lif
, translates as “one left [over].” That’s what happens when you count to ten on your fingers and still have one left over.

Twelve:
Means “two left over.”

Pirate:
From the Greek word for “attacker.”

Bus:
Shortened from the French phrase
voiture omnibus
, “vehicle for all.”

Taxi:
Shortened from
taximeter-cabriolet. Cabriolet
was the name given to two-wheeled carriages...and
taximeter
was the device that “measured the charge.”

Bylaw:
A descendant of the Old Norse term
byr log
, which meant “village law.”

Obvious:
Comes from the Latin words
ob viam
, which mean “in the way.” Something that’s obvious is so clear to see that you can’t help but stumble across it.

Hazard:
From the Arabic words
al-zahr
, “a die,” the name of a game played with dice. Then as now, gambling was
hazardous
to your financial health.

Scandal:
From the Greek word for “snare, trap, or stumbling block.”

The #1 song of 1959 was “Mack the Knife,” by Bobby Darin.

The dodo bird has been labeled the “mascot of extinction” and the “poster child for endangered species.” Here’s a look at the ill-fated fowl
.

B
ACKGROUND

You may have heard of the dodo—or been called one—but you’ve never seen one.
Webster’s New World Dictionary
offers three definitions for dodo:“foolish, stupid”; “an old-fashioned person, a fogy”; and “a large bird, now extinct, that had a hooked bill, a short neck and legs, and rudimentary wings useless for flying.”

In fact, the dodo, now synonymous with stupidity, was the first animal species acknowledged to have been forced into extinction by man. It was probably one of the fastest extinctions in history.

MAIRITIUS IS “DISCOVERED”

Portuguese mariners first landed on Mauritius, a small island 400 miles east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, in about 1507. There they encountered a strange, flightless bird. Weighing more than 50 lbs., it was slightly larger than a turkey, as sluggish as a turtle, and remarkably stupid. The Portuguese named it
duodo
or “simpleton.”

Dutch settlers were the next Westerners to arrive on the island; they called the dodo
dodaers
(“fat asses”) and even
Walghvögel
(“nauseus bird”), because the bird tasted terrible. “Greasie stomachs may seeke after them,” one taster remarked in 1606, “but to the delicate they are offensive and of no nourishment.”

THE DODO’S SECRET

Centuries of isolation from other animals and the absence of any natural enemies on Mauritius had deprived the dodo of its instinct for survival. For example:

• The dodo didn’t bother to build nests for its eggs. It just laid them on the ground wherever it happened to be at the time...and just walked off afterward, abandoning the egg to whatever fate befell it. This wasn’t a bad strategy when there were no predators around. But in time, humans brought monkeys, rats, pigs, and dogs to the island. They feasted on the eggs they found.

Amazing fact: 20% of the people in human history who lived beyond age 65 are still alive today.

• It had no fear of humans. The early Mauritian settlers literally had to walk around the birds, or shove them aside with their feet when they walked around the island. If the settlers were hungry, they just killed the birds and ate them; others of the species would watch dumbly.

THE DISAPPEARING DODO

Dodos were plentiful in 1507, when man first arrrived, but by 1631 they were already quite scarce.

No one knows precisely when the dodo went extinct, but when the Frenchman François Leguat inventoried the wildlife of Mauritius in 1693, he made no mention of any bird resembling it—although he did note ominously that the wild boars (introduced by Western settlers) devoured “all the young animals they catch.”

MISSED OPPORTUNITY

Was the dodo’s extinction inevitable? Some experts say no. They point to animals such as domesticated cows, which flourish even though they’re “slow, weak, stupid, and altogether uncompetitive.” They think that if dodos had lasted for one more generation, they might have been successfully domesticated.

According to one account:

On several occasions during the 17th century, living birds were brought from the Indian Ocean to Europe, and some of these were exhibited to the public. Even during the century in which it became extinct, the species aroused great interest in Europe. Had Dodos survived for a few more decades, colonies might perhaps have established themselves in European parks and gardens. Today, Dodos might be as common as peacocks in ornamental gardens the world over! Instead, all that remains are a few bones and pieces of skin, a collection of pictures of varying quality, and a series of written descriptions [that are] curiously inadequate in the information they convey.

The world’s fastest typist can type 216 words per minute.

THE LAST DODO

Not only are there no
live
dodos, there aren’t even any
dead
ones left. The last stuffed specimen, collected by John Tradescant, a 17th-century horticulturist and collector of oddities, was donated to Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University after his death. It remained there until 1755. “In that year,”
Horizon
magazine reported in 1971,

the university...considered what to do with the dodo, which was probably stuffed with salt and sand, by then altogether tatty, and, who knows, maybe lice-infested. [Museum instructions] said: “That as any particular [specimen] grows old and perishing the Keeper may remove it into one of the closets or other repository, and some other to be substituted.” The dodo was removed, and burned. Some thoughtful soul preserved the head and one foot, but there was, of course, no other bird to be substituted. The dodo was extinct.

OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND

So little was known about the dodo that by the middle of the 19th century, nearly 100 years after the Oxford University specimen was thrown out, people believed it had never existed, and had been merely “a legend like the unicorn.”

It took a little digging to prove otherwise. “In 1863,” recounts Enrol Fuller in his book
Extinct Birds
, “a persistent native of Mauritius, George Clark, realizing the island’s volcanic soil was too hard to hold fossils, decided that some dodo bones might have been washed up by rains on the muddy delta near the town of Mahebourg. He led an excavation that yielded a great quantity of dodo bones, which were assembled into complete skeletons and sent to the museums of the world. Joy! The dodo lived again.”

LEWIS CARROLL’S DODO

Today, the most famous dodo bird is probably the one in
Alice in Wonderland
. Perhaps because the dodo is a symbol of stupidity, Lewis Carroll used it to parody politicians. His dodo is a windbag, runs aimlessly, and placates the masses with other people’s assets...then ceremoniously gives some of them back to the original owner.

Virginia has more ghosts registered with the Ghost Research Society (69) than any other state.

ALICE & THE DODO

When Alice became a giant in Wonderland, she began to cry. Her tears turned into a flood that swept away everything—including a strange menagerie of birds, mice, and other creatures. Finally the flood subsided and the dripping-wet animals wanted to get dry. First, a mouse tried reciting English history (“The driest thing I know”) When that didn’t work, the Dodo made a suggestion. Here’s the passage in which the dodo appears:

THE DODO SPEAKS

“How are you getting on now, my dear?” the mouse said, turning to Alice as it spoke.

“As wet as ever,” said Alice in a melancholy tone. “it doesn’t seem to dry me at all.”

“In that case,’ said the Dodo solemnly, rising to its feet, “I move that the meeting adjourn, for the immediate adoption of more energetic remedies—”

“Speak English!” said the Eaglet. “I don’t know the meaning of half those long words, and, what’s more, I don’t believe you do either!’ And the Eaglet bent down its head to hide a smile: some of the other birds tittered audibly.

“What I was going to say,” said the Dodo in an offended tone, “was, that the best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus-race.”