Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader (38 page)

              AN

4.              LOOK

   LOOK   U   LOOK

LOOK

5. “Remember,” she said to the group,

WE WESTAND FALL

6. “Why’d he do that?” Jesse asked. “Well, son,” I said, he’s a DKI

7. Texas? I love

S     P     A     C     E     S

8. “Drat! My watch broke.” Time to get it RE-RE

9. “I remember the 1960s,” she said, GNIKOOL

10. No, we’re not living together anymore. It’s a

L   E   G   A   L

11. Haven’t seen him in a while. He’s

FAR                                  HOME

12. Careful, I warned my sister. He’s a WOWOLFOL

13. “How do I get out of here?” he asked. I said, “Just calm down and put the

        R A C

14. I tried to teach her, but no luck. I guess she’s a

        DLIHC

15. When it’s raining...

AN UMBRELLA
            SHEME

HINTS (if you need them):

• The answer to #1 is John Underwood, Andover Mass (JOHN under WOOD and over MASS)

• Answer to #14: I guess she’s a
backward child
. (DLIHC is child spelled backward.)

The Great Salt Lake is only 13 feet deep.

These foods are fairly common, but you’ve probably never wondered where they come from, have you? Doesn’t matter. We’ll tell you anyway.

C
AMPBELL SOUP.
Arthur Dorrance and his nephew, Dr. John Thompson Dorrance, took over the Campbell canning company when its founder, Joseph Campbell, retired in 1894. A few years later they perfected a method of condensing tomato soup—which made it cheaper to package and ship—but they couldn’t decide on a design for the label. That Thanksgiving, company employee Herberton L. Williams went to a football game between Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania. He was impressed with Cornell’s new red and white uniforms—and suggested to his bosses that they use those colors on the label. They did.

WHEATIES.
Invented in 1921 by a Minneapolis health spa owner who fed his patients homemade bran gruel to keep them regular and help them lose weight. One day he spilled some on the stove, and it hardened into a crust. He was going to throw it out, but decided to eat it instead. To his surprise, the flakes he scraped off the stove tasted better than the stuff in the pot...so he made more and showed them to a friend at the Washburn Crosby Company (predecessor to General Mills). People at the company liked the flakes too, but didn’t like the way they crumbled. So they came up with a better one using wheat. Once they had a flake they were satisfied with, they held a company-wide contest to name the product. Jane Bausman, the wife of a company executive, suggested
Wheaties
.

PEPPERIDGE FARM.
One of Margaret Rudkin’s sons suffered from severe asthma, a condition that became worse when he ate processed food. She couldn’t find any bread that didn’t make him ill, so in 1935 she started baking him stone-ground whole wheat bread. One day she brought a loaf to the boy’s doctor; he liked it so much he began recommending it to other patients. After building up a small mail-order business to local asthmatics and allergy-sufferers, she expanded her customer base to include people who
weren’t
sick—and named her company after the family’s 125-acre farm in Connecticut,
Pepperidge Farm
.

That’s progress: Jimmy Carter was the first president born in a hospital.

LOG CABIN SYRUP.
Invented in 1887 by P. J. Towle, a St. Paul, Minnesota, grocer who wanted to combine the flavor of maple syrup with the affordability of sugar syrup. He planned to name his creation after his boyhood hero, Abraham Lincoln, but there were already so many Lincoln products that he named it after the president’s birthplace instead. It sold in tin containers shaped like log cabins until World War II, when metal shortages forced the company to switch to glass bottles.

BROWN ’N SERVE ROLLS.
Invented accidentally by Joe Gregor, a Florida baker and volunteer firefighter. One morning the fire alarm sounded while Gregor was baking some rolls, and he had to pull them out of the oven half-baked to go fight the fire. He was about to throw them out when he got back, but he decided to finish baking them, to see if they were still good. They were.

SANKA.
Dr. Ludwig Roselius was a turn-of-the-century European coffee merchant looking for a way to decaffeinate coffee beans without harming the aroma and flavor. He wasn’t having much luck—until someone gave him a “ruined” consignment of coffee beans that had been swamped with seawater while in transit. The damaged beans behaved differently than regular beans, and inspired Roselius to begin a new round of experiments with them. He eventually succeeded in removing 97% of the caffeine while keeping the natural coffee flavor. He named his new product
Sanka
, a contraction of the French “
sans caffeine
.”

FOLGER’S COFFEE.
James Folger and his older brothers, Edward and Harry, planned on joining the California Gold Rush in 1849—but when they got to San Francisco, they only had enough money for two of them to continue on to the Gold Country. James had to stay behind; he eventually decided to go into the coffee business. Today people take roasted coffee for granted—but in the 1840s most people roasted coffee themselves in their own homes. When Folger thought of his brothers in the Gold Country and how difficult it was for them to roast their own beans, he decided to roast his beans before selling them.

Random thought:
“History is a set of lies agreed upon.”

—Napoleon Bonaparte

Feeling hungry? The average supermarket stocks 12,341 different items.

A few thoughts from George Bernard Shaw, the curmudgeon who was considered the greatest English playwright since Shakespeare.

“I often quote myself; it adds spice to my conversation.”

“Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.”

“When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.”

“A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.”

“A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.”

“I am a gentleman; I live by robbing the poor.”

“England and America are two countries separated by the same language.”

“If all economists were laid end to end they would not reach a conclusion.”

“Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.”

“No man can be a pure specialist without being, in a strict sense, an idiot.”

“There may be some doubt as to who are the best people to have in charge of children, but there can be no doubt that parents are the worst.”

“We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence...on pain of liquidation.”

“The fickleness of the women whom I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.”

“The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.”

“The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.”

“There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.”

They have more to say: 29% of 18 to 24-year-olds talk in their sleep; 9% of people over 50 do.

Why is April 1 a “fools’ day”? The most plausible explanation is one we wrote in the first Bathroom Reader: “Until 1564 it was a tradition to begin the New Year with a week of celebration, ending with a big party. But the calendar was different then; the New Year began on March 25, and the biggest party fell on April 1. In 1564 a new calendar made January 1 the New Year. People who forgot—or didn’t realize—what had happened, and still showed up to celebrate on April 1, were called ‘April fools.’” These days, most of the memorable April Fools’ jokes are played by radio and TV stations. Here are a few recent classics.

P
ASTA FARMING

On April 1, 1966, the BBC broadcast a TV documentary on spaghetti-growing in Italy. Among the film’s highlights: footage of Italian farmers picking market-ready spaghetti from “spaghetti plants.” To the BBC’s astonishment, British viewers accepted the news that Italy’s “pasta farmers” had been able to fight off the “spaghetti weevil, which has been especially destructive recently.”

HE’S BA-A-ACK

In 1992 National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation” news show announced on April 1 that Richard Nixon had entered the race for president. They actually interviewed the “former president” (played by impressionist Rich Little) on the air. “I never did anything wrong,” he announced, “and I won’t ever do it again.” Listeners actually called the show to comment. “Nixon is more trustworthy than Clinton,” one remarked. “Nixon never screwed around with anyone’s wife except his own. And according to some accounts, not even with her.”

GRAVITATIONAL PULL

On April 1, 1976, a famous British astronomer told BBC radio audiences that since the planet Pluto would be passing close to Jupiter on April 1, the Earth’s gravitational pull would decrease slightly for about 24 hours. He explained that listeners would feel the effect most if they jumped into the air at precisely 9:47 a.m. that morning. The BBC switchboard was jammed with listeners calling to say that the experiment had worked.

Gail Borden, inventor of condensed milk, also coined the phrase “Remember the Alamo!”

COLORFUL BROADCAST

In the 1970s, Britain’s Radio Norwich announced on April 1 that it was experimenting with “color radio,” and that the tests would affect the brilliance of tuning lights on radios at home. Some listeners actually reported seeing results: one complained that the experiment had affected the traffic lights in his area; another asked the station managers how much longer the bright colors he saw would be streaming out of his radio.

ANIMAL BEHAVIOR

On April 1, 1992, TV’s Discovery Channel ran a “nature documentary” called “Pet Hates,” actually a spoof of nature films by a British humorist posing as an animal expert. In the film the humorist criticized the animals for their “sexual excesses, appalling sense of hygiene and all-around stupidity”—and denounced them as “sex-crazed, bug-awful, foul-breathed, all-fornicating, all-urinating, disease-ridden, half-wit, furry, four-legged perverts.”

DRIVING PRANK

One year a Paris radio station announced that from April 1 on, all Europe would begin driving on the left. Some drivers actually started driving on the left side of the road. A number of accidents resulted (no fatalities, though).

NEEDLING PEOPLE

In 1989 a Seattle TV station interrupted its regular April 1 broadcast with a report that the city’s famous Space Needle had collapsed, destroying nearby buildings in the fall. The report included fake eyewitness accounts from the scene, which were punctuated with bogus updates from the studio newsroom. The “live” footage was so realistic that viewers jammed 911 lines trying to find out if their loved ones were safe. The station later apologized.

THE JOKE IS RED

Even the media of the former Soviet Union celebrates April Fools’ Day. In 1992 the Moscow press printed stories claiming that gay rights activists had crossed the Atlantic Ocean in condoms, and that the Moscow City Council was planning a second subway system “in the interest of competition.”

Model citizen: President Zachary Taylor never voted in a presidential election.

A few things you probably didn’t know about the founding fathers who wrote the U.S. Constitution
.

T
HE MYTH:
The men who attended the Constitutional Convention in 1787 were a sober, well-behaved group. They showed up on time, stuck it out ’til the end, and were all business when it came to the important task at hand.

THE TRUTH:
Not quite. According to historical documents found by researchers at the National Constitution Center in 1992:

• Nineteen of the 74 people chosen to attend the convention never even showed up. (At least one of them had a good excuse, though—William Blount of New York refused to make the horseback ride to Philadelphia because of hemorrhoids.)

• Of the 55 who
did
show up, only 39 signed the document. Twelve people left early, and 4 others refused to sign. “A lot of them ran out of money and had to leave because they were doing a lot of price gouging here,” observes researcher Terry Brent. Besides, he adds, the hot weather and high humidity must have been murder on the delegates, who wore wool breeches and coats. “They must have felt like dying. Independence Hall must have smelled like a cattle barn.”

• And how did the Founding Fathers unwind during this pivotal moment in our nation’s history? By getting drunk as skunks. One document that survived is the booze bill for a celebration party thrown two days before the Constitution was signed on September 17, 1787. According to the bill, the 55 people at the party drank 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, 8 bottles of whiskey, 22 bottles of port, 8 bottles of cider, 12 bottles of beer, and 7 large bowls of alcoholic punch. “These were really huge punch bowls that ducks could swim in,” Brent reports. “The partiers were also serenaded by 16 musicians. They had to be royally drunk—they signed the Constitution on the 17th. On the 16th, they were probably lying somewhere in the streets of Philadelphia.”

Important first: Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first president to make a hole-in-one in golf.

Everyone’s got a question or two they’d like answered—basic stuff, like “Why is the sky blue?” Here are a few of those questions, with answers from books by some of the nation’s top trivia experts
.

H
OLY QUESTION

Q:
Why are manhole covers round?

A:
“So they can’t be dropped
through
the manhole itself. Squares, rectangles, ovals, and other shapes could be positioned so they’d slip into the manhole. Round manhole covers rest on a lip that’s smaller than the cover. So the size and shape keeps the manhole cover from falling in.” (From
The Book of Answers
, by Barbara Berliner)