Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader (25 page)

Saint Matthew:
Patron Saint of Accountants. (He was a tax collector before becoming an apostle.)

Saint Joseph of Cupertino:
Patron Saint of Air Travelers. (Nicknamed “The Flying Friar,” he could levitate.)

Saint Fiacre:
Patron Saint of Taxi Drivers, Hemorrhoid Sufferers, and Venereal Disease.

Saint Matrona:
Patron Saint of Dysentery Sufferers.

Saint Louis IX of France:
Patron Saint of Button Makers.

Saint Adrian of Nicomedia:
Patron Saint of Arms Dealers.

Saint Anne:
Patron Saint of Women in Labor. (Not to be confused with Saint John Thwing, Patron Saint of Women in
Difficult
Labor.)

Saint Nicholas of Myra
(also known as Santa Claus): Patron Saint of Children and Pawn-brokers.

Saint Bernardino of Siena:
Patron Saint of Advertisers and Hoarseness.

Saint Blaise:
Patron Saint of Throats (he saved a child from choking) and Diseased Cattle (he also healed animals).

Saint Joseph:
Patron Saint of Opposition to Atheistic Communism.

Saint Sebastian:
Patron Saint of Neighborhood Watch Groups.

Saint Joseph of Arimathea:
Patron Saint of Funeral Directors.

Saint Eligius:
Patron Saint of Gas Station Workers. (He miraculously cured horses, the precursors to automobiles.)

Saint Martin de Porres:
Patron Saint of Race Relations, Social Justice, and Italian Hairdressers.

Saint Martha:
Patron Saint of Dietitians.

In 1992 former Panamanian pres. Noriega’s wife was arrested in Miami for shoplifting buttons.

Not all scientific progress is the product of systematic experimentation. A number of important modern discoveries have been a matter of chance—which means you should keep your eyes and ears open, even while you’re just sitting there on the john. You never know what might happen.

T
he Discovery:
Insulin

How It Happened:
In 1889 Joseph von Mering and Oscar Minkowski, two German scientists, were trying to understand more about the digestive system. As part of their experiments, they removed the pancreas from a living dog to see what role the organ plays in digestion.

The next day a laboratory assistant noticed an extraordinary number of flies buzzing around the dog’s urine. Von Mering and Minkowski examined the urine to see why...and were surprised to discover that it contained a high concentration of sugar. This indicated that the pancreas plays a role in removing sugar from the bloodstream.

Legacy:
Von Mering and Minkowski were never able to isolate the chemical that produced this effect, but their discovery enabled John J. R. MacLeod and Frederick Banting, two Canadian researchers, to develop insulin extracts from horse and pig pancreases and to pioneer their use as a treatment for diabetes in 1921.

The Discovery:
Photography

How It Happened:
The
camera obscura
, designed by Leonardo da Vinci in the early 1500s and perfected in 1573 by E. Danti, was a workable camera. It was widely used in the early 1800s—but not for taking photographs. The reason: The technology for photos didn’t exist. People used the camera for tracing images instead, placing transparent paper over its glass plate.

In the 1830s, French artist L. J. M. Daguerre began experimenting with ways of recording a camera’s images on light-sensitive photographic plates. By 1838 he’d made some progress; using silver-coated sheets of copper, he found a way to capture an image.

Aztec emperor Montezuma had a nephew, Cuitlahac, whose name meant “plenty of excrement.”

However, the image was so faint that it was barely visible. He tried dozens of substances to see if they’d darken it...but nothing worked. Frustrated, Daguerre put the photographic plate away in a cabinet filled with chemicals and moved on to other projects.

A few days later, Daguerre took the plate out. To his astonishment, the plate had mysteriously darkened; now the image was perfectly visible. One of the chemicals in the cabinet was almost certainly responsible...but which one?

He devised a method to find out. Each day he removed one chemical from the cabinet and put a fresh photographic plate in. If the plate still darkened overnight, the chemical would be disqualified. If it didn’t, he’d know he’d found the chemical he was looking for. It seemed like a good idea, but even after
all
the chemicals had been removed, the plate continued to darken. Daguerre wondered why. Then, examining the cabinet closely, he noticed a few drops of mercury that had spilled from a broken thermometer onto one of the shelves.

Legacy:
Later experiments with mercury vapor proved that this substance was responsible. The daguerrotype’s worldwide popularity paved the way for the development of photography.

The Discovery:
Safety glass

How It Happened:
In 1903 Edouard Benedictus, a French chemist, was experimenting in his lab when he dropped an empty glass flask on the floor. It shattered, but remained in the shape of a flask. Benedictus was bewildered. When he examined the flask more closely, he discovered that the inside was coated with a film residue of cellulose nitrate, a chemical he’d been working with earlier. The film had held the glass together.

Not long afterward, Benedictus read a newspaper article about a girl who had been badly injured by flying glass in a car accident. He thought back to the glass flask in his lab and realized that coating automobile windshields, as the inside of the flask had been coated, would make them less dangerous.

Legacy:
Variations of the safety glass he produced—a layer of plastic sandwiched by two layers of glass—are still used in automobiles today.

A typical eggshell takes up 12% of an egg’s weight.

Here are a few more movie mistakes to look for in popular films.

M
ovie:
Rear
Window
(1954)

Scene:
Jimmy Stewart, in a cast and sitting in a wheelchair, argues with Grace Kelly.

Blooper:
His cast switches from his left leg to his right.

Movie:
Raiders
of the Lost Ark
(1982)

Scene:
German soldiers and Gestapo agents lift the ark.

Blooper:
Paintings of C3P0 and R2D2, the androids from
Star Wars
(another George Lucas film), are included among the hieroglyphics on the wall.

Movie:
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
(1977)

Scene:
Richard Dreyfus and Melinda Dillon smash through several road blocks as they near Devil’s Tower.

Blooper:
The license plate on their station wagon keeps changing.

Movie:
Abbot and Costello Go to Mars
(1953)

Blooper:
In the movie they actually go to Venus.

Movie:
Camelot
(1967)

Scene:
King Arthur (Richard Harris) praises his medieval kingdom while speaking to some of his subjects.

Blooper:
Harris is wearing a Band-Aid on his neck.

Movie:
The Fortune Cookie
(1966)

Scene:
Walter Matthau leaves one room and enters another—and appears to lose weight in the process.

Blooper:
Matthau suffered a heart attack while this scene was being filmed; only half was completed before he entered the hospital. He returned five months later to finish the job—40 pounds lighter than he was in the first part of the scene.

Movie:
Diamonds Are Forever
(1971)

Scene:
James Bond tips his Ford Mustang up onto two wheels and drives through a narrow alley to escape from the bad guys.

Blooper:
The Mustang enters the alley on its two right wheels—and leaves the alley on its two
left
wheels.

At one North Carolina golf club, you can rent a llama to be your caddy for $100.

You’ve probably heard that lemmings commit mass suicide when they experience overpopulation. It turns out that isn’t true...and you can blame the myth on the Walt Disney Company.

T
HE MYTH

In 1958 Walt Disney produced
White Wilderness
, a documentary about life in the Arctic. This film gave us the first close look at the strange habits of arctic rodents called lemmings.

• “They quite literally eat themselves out of house and home,” says the narrator. “With things as crowded as this, someone has to make room for somebody somehow. And so, Nature herself takes a hand....A kind of compulsion seizes each tiny rodent and, carried along by an unreasoning hysteria, each falls into step for a march that will take them to a strange destiny.”

• The film shows a pack of lemmings marching to the sea, where they “dutifully toss themselves over a cliff into certain death in icy Arctic waters.” “The last shot,” says critic William Poundstone, “shows the sea awash with dying lemmings.”

• The narrator says: “Gradually strength wanes...determination ebbs away...and the Arctic Sea is dotted with tiny bobbing bodies.”

THE TRUTH

• According to a 1983 investigation by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation producer Brian Vallee,
White Wilderness
’s lemming scene was sheer fabrication.

• Vallee says the lemmings were brought to Alberta—a landlocked province that isn’t their natural habitat—where Disney folks put them on a giant turntable piled with snow to film the “migration segment.”

• Then, Vallee reports, they recaptured the lemmings and took them to a cliff over a river. “When the well-adjusted lemmings wouldn’t jump,” writes Poundstone, “the Disney people gave Nature a hand [and tossed them off]....Lemmings don’t commit mass suicide. As far as zoologists can tell, it’s a myth.”

Shocking fact: 7 times as many men as women are killed by lightning in the U.S.

Here are six popular songs that originated in a foreign language and were translated into English—sometimes by people with no idea of what the original lyrics were. From
Behind the Hits,
by Bob Shannon.

I
T’S NOW OR NEVER—ELVIS PRESLEY

Background:
In 1901 Italian composer Eduardo di Capua wrote “
O Sole Mio
.” This operatic theme was eventually popularized in America by Mario Lanza (who sang it in Italian) and again by Tony Martin in 1949. Martin’s version, an English “translation,” was called “There’s No Tomorrow.” It hit #2 on the pop charts in 1949.

The Elvis Version:
While Elvis was in the Army from 1958 to 1959, he decided to clean up his image by recording a new version of “
O Sole Mio
” that even teenagers’
parents
could love. (Although his fans didn’t know it, Presley had always admired operatic voices like Mario Lanza’s.) But Elvis didn’t like the Tony Martin version—it “wasn’t his style”—so he commissioned a new set of lyrics.

It took two New York writers 20 minutes to write the song. Elvis loved it (it became his favorite of all his records) and recorded it about two weeks after he got out of the Army. It hit #1 all over the globe, selling more than 20 million copies worldwide. For a few years, it was listed in the
Guinness Book of World Records
as the largest-selling single in the history of pop music.

MY WAY—FRANK SINATRA

Background:
The lyrics of this song were written specifically with Sinatra in mind, but the melody belonged to a French tune called “
Comme d’habitude
,” or “As Usual.”

The Sinatra Version:
Paul Anka, who felt a growing affinity with Frank Sinatra, decided that if he ever had the chance, he’d write something special for ol’ Blue Eyes. And at about three o’clock on a rainy Las Vegas morning, it happened. As he thought of the melody of “
Comme d’habitude
” (which he’d heard in France), the words of “My Way” spontaneously came to him. “[It was] one of the magic moments in my writing career,” he says. “I finished it in an hour and a half.” Sinatra loved the song and spent two weeks perfecting
it. Within a year it had been recorded by over a hundred different artists. Elvis Presley did a live version in 1977 that sold over a million copies.

Henry Ford was America’s first billionaire.

VOLARE—DEAN MARTIN, BOBBY RYDELL, & OTHERS

Background:
The original Italian version, by Domenico Modugno, was a million-seller in the U.S. and the #1 record of 1958. The original title, however, was not “
Volare
,” but “
Nel Blu, Dipinto di Blu
” (literal translation: “the blue, painted in blue”). The lyrics told the story of a man dreaming he was flying through the air with his hands painted blue.

The English Version:
When Modugno’s record started selling in the U.S., American artists clamored for an English-language version they could record. So Mitchel Parish wrote new lyrics, retitling the song “
Volare
.” About a dozen versions were released right away, and combined sales of the song in 1958 alone were estimated at eight million. The bestselling U.S. renditions: Dean Martin’s (#12 in 1958), Bobby Rydell’s (#4 in 1960), and Al Martino’s (#15 in 1975). Chrysler Corp. even named a car after the song.

SEASONS IN THE SUN—TERRY JACKS

Background:
The song was originally written as “
Le Moribund
” (literal translation: “the dying man”) by Jacques Brel in 1961.

The English Version:
Rod McKuen adapted the song to English in 1964, and Terry Jacks heard it on a Kingston Trio record. In 1972 he took it to a Beach Boys’ session he was producing, and the Beach Boys recorded it...but didn’t release it. So Jacks, who was distraught over a friend’s death, did his own version.

Jacks was playing his year-old recording of it one day at his house when the boy who delivered his newspapers overheard it; the boy liked it so much that he brought some friends over to Jacks’s house to listen to it, and their enthusiastic response inspired him to release it on his own Goldfish record label. The result: It skyrocketed to #1 all over the world and sold 11.5 million copies.