Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader (63 page)

OVER THE HUMP

Q:
How long can a camel go without water?

A:
“A camel can go for 17 days without drinking any water.... There is a secret to this: The camel carries a great deal of fat in its hump and has the ability to manufacture water out of this hump by oxidation. This is not to say that the camel doesn’t get thirsty. When it gets the chance to drink after a long drought, it can suck down 25 gallons of water.” (From
Science Trivia
, by Charles Cazeau)

BOXED RAISINS

Q:
Why don’t the raisins in Raisin Bran fall to the bottom of the box?

A:
“Raisins are added to boxes only after more than half of the cereal has already been packed. The cereal thus has a chance to settle and condense. During average shipping conditions, boxes get jostled a bit...so the raisins actually sift and become evenly distributed throughout the box.” (From
Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise, and Other Imponderables
, by David Feldman)

CHOCOLATE

Q:
Who brought chocolate from the New World to Europe?

A:
When the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortés wrote to Emperor Charles V of Spain from the New World, he described a “divine drink...which builds up resistance and fights fatigue.” Cortés was speaking of
chocolatl
, a drink the Aztecs brewed from the native
cacao
bean, which was valued so highly that it was used as currency. He brought some home to Spain and it became popular instantly.

Ants stretch—and possibly even yawn—after resting.

We all know the first president (Washington), the first president to serve more than two terms (FDR), and so on. But who was the first to get stuck in a bathtub? Here’s another BRI list of presidential firsts, with thanks to Bruce Fowler’s book
One of a Kind.

T
HE PRESIDENT:
Grover Cleveland (1885-89; 1893-97)

NOTABLE FIRST:
First president to have hanged a man.

BACKGROUND:
From 1871 to 1873, he was sheriff of Erie County, New York. When two men were sentenced to death there, Cleveland put the hoods over their heads, tightened the noose, and sprung the trap door himself. He explained later that he couldn’t ask his deputies to do it just because he didn’t want to. The experience affected him so deeply that he didn’t run for reelection.

THE PRESIDENT:
James Garfield (1881)

NOTABLE FIRST:
First president who could write in two languages at once.

BACKGROUND:
Garfield was ambidextrous; he could write in Greek with one hand while writing in Latin with the other.

THE PRESIDENT:
William Howard Taft (1909-1913)

NOTABLE FIRST:
First president entrapped by a White House plumbing fixture.

BACKGROUND:
Taft weighed in at between 300 and 350 lbs. while he was president. He was so big that one morning he got stuck in the White House tub—and had to call his aides to help him get out. Taft subsequently ordered a tub large enough to hold four men. He never got stuck again.

THE PRESIDENT:
James Madison (1809-1817)

NOTABLE FIRST:
First president to weigh less than his IQ.

BACKGROUND:
Madison, the unofficial “Father of the U.S.
Constitution,” was only 5'4" tall and never weighed more than 98 lbs. as president. One historian has called him “a dried-up, wizened little man”—and observed that when he went walking with his friend Thomas Jefferson, the two looked “as if they were on their way to a father-and-son banquet.”

More Americans die in January than in any other month.

THE PRESIDENT:
John Tyler (1841-1845)

NOTABLE FIRST:
First president to elope while in office.

BACKGROUND:
On June 26, 1844, the 54-year-old Tyler sneaked off to New York City with 24-year-old Julia Gardiner to tie the knot. They decided on a secret wedding because supporters were worried about the public’s reaction to their 30-year age difference. It didn’t matter—the press found out about it almost at once. Ironically, Julia turned out to be just about the most popular part of Tyler’s presidency. (P.S.: They had seven kids—the last one when Tyler was 70.)

THE PRESIDENT:
Herbert Hoover (1929-1933)

NOTABLE FIRST:
First president to have an asteroid named after him.

BACKGROUND:
No, it’s not in honor of his presidency. In 1920, Austrian astronomer Johann Palisa discovered an asteroid and named it
Hooveria
, to honor Hoover’s humanitarian work as chairman of the Interallied Food Council, which was helping to feed starving people in post–World War I Europe. Said Palisa, “It is a pity we have only a middle-magnitude asteroid to give to this great man. He is worthy of at least a planet.”

THE PRESIDENT:
Jimmy Carter (1976-1980)

NOTABLE FIRST:
First president to see a UFO.

BACKGROUND:
One evening in 1969, Carter and a few companions saw a “bluish...then reddish” saucer-shaped object moving across the sky. “It seemed to move toward us from a distance,” Carter later told UFO researchers, “then it stopped and moved partially away. It returned and departed. It came close...maybe three hundred to one thousand yards away...moved away, came close, and then moved away.” He added: “I don’t laugh at people anymore when they say they’ve seen UFOs.”

The U.S. government spends $79 million a day on “intelligence.”

The title doesn’t really mean anything. We had a bunch of stories about food we wanted to use, and “cold” was the only thing we could think of that the foods had in common
.

S
WANSON TV DINNERS.
When Carl Swanson stepped off the boat from Sweden in 1896, the only thing he owned was the sign around his neck that read, “Carl Swanson, Swedish. Send me to Omaha. I speak no English.” Someone sent him to Omaha, where he started a grocery wholesale business that grew into the largest turkey processor in the United States. When his sons took over the company after his death, they began expanding their product line beyond turkeys. Two of their first additions: frozen turkey and fried-chicken meals they called “TV dinners,” packaged in wood-grain boxes that simulated televisions. (Swanson didn’t only intend that the meals be eaten in front of the TV—it also wanted to associate its “heat-and-eat miracle” with the magic of television.)

Swanson’s first TV dinners bombed. The sweet potatoes in the turkey dinner were too watery, and customers complained that the fried chicken tasted like bananas—a problem caused by slow-drying, banana-scented yellow dye that leached from the cardboard box onto the chicken. Swanson fixed the first problem by switching to regular potatoes; it solved the chicken problem by giving the boxes a longer time to dry. (What did it do with the chicken that had already been contaminated? It sold it to a Florida food chain that said its customers preferred the “new” banana taste.)

ESKIMO PIES.
Christian Nelson owned a candy and ice cream store in Onawa, Iowa. One day in 1920, a kid came into the store and ordered a candy bar...and then changed his mind and asked for an ice cream sandwich...and then changed his mind again and asked for a marshmallow-nut bar. Nelson wondered for a minute why there wasn’t any one candy-and-ice-cream bar to satisfy all of the kid’s cravings—and then decided to make one himself: a vanilla bar coated with a chocolate shell. Once he figured out how to make the chocolate stick to the ice cream, he had to think of a name for his product. At a dinner party, someone suggested
“Eskimo,” because it sounded cold. But other people thought it sounded too exotic—so Nelson added the word “pie.”

What professionals are most likely to become alcoholics? Barbers, say drug treatment experts.

MINUTE MAID ORANGE JUICE.
In 1942 the U.S. Army announced that it would award a $750,000 contract to any company that could produce an orange juice “powder” cheap enough to send to troops overseas. After three years of intense research, the National Research Corporation (NRC) developed a way to concentrate and freeze orange juice, and was working out the bugs in the drying process. It won the contract—but just as it was lining up the financing for an orange juice plant, the U.S. dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima and World War II came to an end.

Convinced that powdered orange juice had a future, the NRC decided to forge ahead with its efforts to perfect the drying process. To raise money for the research, the company decided to unload some of its backlog of frozen concentrated orange juice. Marketed under the name Minute Maid, the stuff sold so well that NRC went into the frozen orange juice business instead.

ICE CREAM MISCELLANY

Ice Cream Sodas.
In 1874, soda-fountain operator Robert M. Green sold a drink he made out of sweet cream, syrup, and carbonated water soda. One day he ran out of cream...so he used vanilla ice cream instead.

Ice Cream Sundaes.
It seems ridiculous now, but in the 1890s, many religious leaders objected to people drinking ice cream sodas on Sunday. It was too frivolous. When “blue laws” were passed prohibiting the sale of ice cream sodas on Sunday, ice cream parlor owners fought back—they created the “Sunday,” which was only sold on the Sabbath; it contained all of the ingredients of a soda
except
the soda water. A few years later the dish was being sold all week, so the name was changed to
sundae
.

Baskin-Robbins 31 Flavors.
After World War II, Irvine Robbins and Burton Baskin built a chain of ice cream stores in southern California. One day in 1953, Robbins says, “we told our advertising agency about our great variety of flavors and we said, almost in jest, that we had a flavor for every day of the month—thirty-one. They hit the table and said that was it, the thirty-one. So we changed the name of the company to Baskin Robbins 31. Like Heinz 57.”

The White House receives an average of 75,850 pieces of correspondence
every day
.

Why do people believe wild, unsubstantiated stories? According to some psychologists, “rumors make things simpler than they redly are.” And while people won’t believe just anything, it’s surprising what stories have flourished in the past. Many of these tales are still in circulation today...

R
UMOR:
Wint-O-Green Lifesavers can kill you.

HOW IT SPREAD:
In 1968 Dr. Howard Edward and Dr. Donald Edward wrote a letter to the
New England Journal of Medicine
warning that the eerie green sparks given off when you chomp on the Lifesavers could—under certain conditions—start a fire. Some possible conditions in which the Lifesavers could kill you: if you ate them in an oxygen tent, a space capsule, or in a room filled with flammable gas. (No word on whether anyone as ever actually
chewed
Wint-O-Greens under such conditions.)

WHAT HAPPENED:
The letter inspired a number of researchers around the country to experiment with Wint-O-Green Lifesavers to see what made them spark, and to see if the sparks were indeed dangerous. Their findings: The sparks are caused by
methyl salicylate
, the synthetic crystalline substance that’s used for flavoring instead of real wintergreen oil. The sparking effect is known scientifically as “triboluminescence,” which is what happens when a crystalline substance is crushed. And since the spark is a “cold luminescence” and not a real spark, it can’t cause an explosion. (Even so, researchers advise, if you are still nervous, just chew on them with your mouth closed.)

THE RUMOR:
Silent-screen starlet Clara Bow slept with the entire starting lineup of the 1927 USC football team.

HOW IT SPREAD:
The story was started by Bow’s private secretary, Daisy DeVoe, whom Bow fired after DeVoe tried to blackmail her. DeVoe got back at her by selling an “inside story” account of Bow’s private life to
Graphic
, a notorious New York tabloid. The USC rumor was only part of the story; DeVoe also claimed that Bow had had affairs with Eddie Cantor, Gary Cooper, Bela Lugosi, and other celebrities.

Home video sales and rentals are the biggest source of income for movie studios.

WHAT HAPPENED:
The surviving members of the 1927 team deny the story is true. Author David Stenn tracked them down while researching his biography
Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild
. They admit that Bow often invited them to her parties, but they were entirely innocent—Bow didn’t even serve alcohol. Even so, the tabloid story destroyed her career: Paramount Studios refused to renew her contract, and Bow “spent the greater part of the rest of her life suffering a series of nervous breakdowns in sanitariums.”

THE RUMOR:
Sesame Street is planning to “kill off” Ernie, the famous muppet of “Ernie and Bert” fame.

HOW IT SPREAD:
The Children’s Television Workshop believes the rumor started somewhere in New England after the 1990 death of muppet creator Jim Henson, who was Ernie’s voice. CTW denied the rumor, but it quickly gained strength; according to Ellen Morgenstern, CTW’s spokeswoman, “We’ve also heard that Ernie was going to die of AIDS, leukemia, a car crash....Someone in New Hampshire even started a letter-writing campaign to save him.”

WHAT HAPPENED:
Sesame Street, the Children’s Television Workshop, and PBS have repeatedly denied the story. As Morgenstern puts it, “Ernie’s not dying of AIDS, he’s not dying of leukemia. Ernie is a puppet.”

THE RUMOR:
Corona Extra beer, imported from Mexico, is contaminated by workers at the brewery who regularly urinate into the beer vats.

HOW IT SPREAD:
Corona Extra beer was introduced into the United States in 1981. It immediately became the brew of choice for southern California surfers. The fad quickly spread—and despite almost no advertising, by 1986 Corona had become the #2 imported beer in the nation. Less than a year later, however, the brand’s importer, Barton Beers of Chicago, was inundated with rumors that Corona was contaminated with urine. Barton traced the rumor back to a competing wholesaler in Reno, Nevada.