Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader (66 page)

When the World Ends:
White Buffalo Calf Woman will purify the world. “She will bring back harmony again, and balance, spiritually.”

Note:
A white buffalo was born in 1994...and another in 1995. Many tribal elders feel these are clear signs that their prophecy is being fulfilled. “Yes indeed, it is a sign,” says one. “The important ones are the last two. These were created with the influence of the Masters.”

For More On the Lakota:
www.blackhills-info.com/lakota_sioux/

Pet lovers: 21% of cat owners and 27% of dog owners include their pets in their wills.

Here are more findings about human behavior, gleaned from Bernard Asbell’s
The Book of You
and
People Watching: Downtown Los Angeles,
by Bob Herman
.

O
N MARRIAGE...

• According to a University of Michigan researcher, if you think you’re starting to look like your spouse, you might be right.

• His study went something like this: Wedding photos of couples that were now in their 50s and 60s were collected, along with current pictures of the same couples. Students were then asked to match pictures of individuals with pictures of their spouses.

• In the younger wedding pictures, students weren’t able to match the couples any better than chance. However, with the contemporary pictures, the students did significantly better.

• Conclusion: Apparently, married individuals are good at mimicking their partners. This can produce similar laugh or frown lines around the eyes and mouth as we age, changing our expressions and making us appear more like our spouses.

Another hint about what’s going on in your marriage:
Research shows that the less comfortable you are with your spouse, the more you’ll look at one another. If you’re comfortable in your marriage, you’ll talk more frequently without glancing at one another. Why? Apparently, people who aren’t relaxed in their marriage tend to monitor their spouses for reactions to what they say and do.

ON JOGGING...

• Research tells us that if you’re a guy out running for exercise, and you pass a woman—any woman—you’ll actually speed up significantly as you pass her...
if
she’s facing your direction. Even if she’s buried in a book, or completely preoccupied and looking through you, your performance will increase as you pass.

• But if her back’s towards you, you won’t change your pace.

Clear priorities: More than 50% of teenage boys say they’d “rather be rich than smart.”

ON PORNOGRAPHY...

• Whether you’re male or female, looking at
Playboy, Penthouse
, or similar magazines won’t improve your sex life.

• Studies find that after eyeing nude photos, people of
both
sexes will rate their partners as less sexually appealing.

• According to research, people also report that they feel less in love with their partners after reading a nudie rag.

ON LOITERING...

• Loitering’s not as easy to do as it may seem—security is pretty tight in some places. But people-watching has proven time and again that some people get away with it more often than others.

• One trick—If you carry something, or if you’re standing in an entranceway, you’re less likely to be hassled by authorities.

• You’re also less likely to attract attention if you’re holding an umbrella or a briefcase rather than standing around empty-handed. Reading, working on something, or at least pretending to do either, while using a library or park bench will buy you a lot more resting time than if you simply reclined for a nap in the same spot.

ON “PERSONAL SPACE”...

• According to Asbell’s
The Book of You
, personal space can be a vertical issue: “If you observe a stranger in a room gradually moving closer to you, you’ll show symptoms of alertness or anxiety sooner if the ceiling is low than if it’s high.”

• When the “room” is an elevator, however, there are special rules:

—If you’re male, you’ll stand closer to a female on an elevator than to another man.

—If you’re female, either a man or woman stranger can stand close to you on an elevator, but they stand a better chance of squeezing in if they’re to your sides, than in front of you.

—Whether male or female, if a stranger on an elevator smiles at you, you’re much more likely to stand closer than if they don’t smile.

The War Between the Sexes continues:
You have a 5-to-1 chance of winning the elbow-rest between the seats on an airplane if you’re male.

Seventy-six percent of teenagers say they believe in angels. That’s up from 64% in 1978.

It’s the most famous painting in the world—even Uncle John has heard of it. But what else do you know about this mysterious lady?

B
ACKGROUND.
Sometime between 1501 and 1506—no one is sure exactly when—Leonardo da Vinci, the great Renaissance artist, scientist, and thinker, painted his master-piece
La Joconde
, better known as the Mona Lisa. Hardly anything is known about the painting. Da Vinci kept extensive records on many of his other paintings, but none on the Mona Lisa. He never once mentioned it in any of his notebooks, and never made any preliminary studies of it.

However, historians believe the painting was one of Leonardo’s favorites. Unlike most of his other paintings, which he painted on commission and turned over to their owners as soon as they were finished, da Vinci kept the Mona Lisa for more than 10 years—and still had it in his possession when he died in 1519.

WHO’S THAT GIRL?

No one knows who really modeled for the Mona Lisa—but some of the popular candidates are:

•
Mona Lisa Gherardini
, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, a Florentine silk merchant. After da Vinci’s death, Gherardini was so widely believed to have been the model for the painting that it was named after her. But art historians now doubt she was the model, because the source of this rumor was Giorgio Vasari, da Vinci’s biographer—who never even saw the painting in person.

•
Another noblewoman
da Vinci knew—or perhaps a composite painting of two or more of them.

•
No one.
Some historians think the painting was a
finzione
or “feigning”—a fictional woman not based on any particular person.

•
Himself.
The painting is a feminine self-portrait. This theory is strange but surprisingly plausible. In 1987, computer scientists at AT&T Bell Laboratories took da Vinci’s 1518
Self-Portrait
, reversed the image (it faces right, not left like the Mona Lisa), enlarged it to the same scale, and juxtaposed it against the Mona Lisa, the similarities were too striking to be accidental...or so they say.

Poll results: 7% of Americans say they have a radio in their bathroom.

MONA LISA FACTS

• The Mona Lisa is considered one of the most important paintings of the Renaissance period—but King Francis I of France, who took possession of the painting after da Vinci died, hung it in the palace bathroom.

• Napoleon, on the other hand, was a big fan of the painting; he called it “The Sphinx of the Occident” and kept it in his bedroom.

• Why is Mona Lisa wearing such a strange smile? Some art historians suspect that this most famous feature may actually be the work of clumsy restorers who tried to touch up the painting centuries ago. Da Vinci may have intended her to wear a much more ordinary expression. Dozens of other theories have been proposed to explain the strange grin, including that Mona Lisa has just lost a child, has asthma or bad teeth, or is really a young man. Sigmund Freud theorized that da Vinci painted the smile that way because it reminded him of his mother.

• Mona Lisa may be “in the family way.” According to writer Seymour Reit, “the lady is definitely pregnant, as shown by the slightly swollen hands and face, and her ‘self-satisfied’ expression.” Other historians disagree—they think that Mona Lisa is just chubby.

THE THEFT

• According to a 1952 Paris study, there are at least 72 excellent 16th- and 17th-century replicas and reproductions of the Mona Lisa in existence—leading conspiracy theorists to speculate that the painting in the Louvre is itself a replica.

• One of the most interesting forgery theories has to do with a theft of the painting that occurred in 1911. On August 21 of that year, the Mona Lisa vanished from the Louvre in what was probably the biggest art heist of the century. French authorities conducted a massive investigation, but were unable to locate the painting. Two years later, an Italian carpenter named Vincenzo Perugia was caught trying to sell the masterpiece to an Italian museum.

The official story is that Perugia wanted to return the work to Italy, da Vinci’s (and his) birthplace. But Seymour Reit, author of
The Day They Stole The Mona
Lisa, theorizes that the plot was the work of Marqués Eduardo de Valfierno, a nobleman who made his living selling forged masterpieces to unsuspecting millionaires. He wanted to do the same with the Mona Lisa—but knew that no one
would buy a forgery of such a famous painting unless the original were stolen from the Louvre first. So de Valfierno paid a forger to paint half a dozen fakes, and then hired Perugia to steal the real Mona Lisa.

European country with the most auto-related fatalities: Portugal. Great Britain has the least.

Reit argues that de Valfierno had no plans for the original masterpiece—he didn’t want to sell it or even own it himself—and was only interested in selling his forgeries. He never even bothered to collect the original from Perugia, who hid it in the false bottom of a dirty steamer trunk for more than two years waiting for de Valfierno to come and get it. But he never did, so Perugia finally gave up and tried to sell the Mona Lisa to an Italian museum. As soon as he handed over the painting, he was arrested and the painting was returned to France. Perugia was tried and convicted, but spent only 7 months in prison for his crime. De Valfierno was never tried.

PROTECTING THE PAINTING

• The Mona Lisa isn’t painted on canvas—it’s painted on a wood panel made from poplar. This makes it extremely fragile, since changes in the moisture content of the wood can cause it to expand and shrink, which cracks the paint.

• Because of this, the Louvre goes to great lengths to protect the Mona Lisa from the elements—and from vandals. Since 1974, the painting has been stored in a bulletproof, climate-controlled box called a
vitrine
that keeps the painting permanently at 68° Fahrenheit and at 50-55% humidity.

• Once a year, the painting is removed from its protective case and given a checkup. The process takes about an hour and requires almost 30 curators, restorers, laboratory technicians, and maintenance workers.

• Despite nearly 500 years of accumulated dust, dirt, and grime, the risks associated with cleaning the masterpiece are so great that the museum refuses to do it—even though the filth has changed the appearance of the painting dramatically. Pierre Rosenberg, the Louvre’s curator, says: “If we saw the Mona Lisa as da Vinci painted it, we would not recognize it....Da Vinci actually painted with bright, vivid colors, not the subdued tones that are visible today.” But he’s adamant about leaving the painting in its present state. “The Mona Lisa is such a sacrosanct image that to touch it would create a national scandal.”

How about you? 64% of women sleep on the left side of the bed.

You are getting sleepy...sleepy...you will do anything we tell you. Now listen carefully: When you leave the bathroom, you will experience an irresistible urge to give everyone you know copies of
Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader.
Do you understand? Good. When you emerge from the bathroom, you won’t remember anything we’ve said. Now resume reading
.

B
ACKGROUND.
The history of hypnotism—drawing someone into an “altered state of consciousness” in which they are more susceptible to suggestion than when fully conscious—dates back thousands of years and is as old as sorcery, medicine, and witchcraft. The first person in modern times to study it was Franz Mesmer, an 18th-century Viennese physician. In 1775 he devised the theory that a person could transmit “universal forces,” known as
animal magnetism
, to other people.

Critics derisively named this practice “Mesmerism,” and chased him out of Vienna for practicing witchcraft. He then resettled in Paris, where a royal commission dismissed Mesmerism’s “cures” as the product of his patients’ imaginations.

Viewed as a crackpot science by the entire medical establishment, mesmerism might have died out, except for one thing: Anesthesia hadn’t been invented yet, and physicians were desperately looking for something to kill pain during surgical procedures. Mesmer himself had performed surgery using mesmerism as anesthesia as early as 1778, and other doctors soon began trying it.

One of the most successful was John Elliotson, a London surgeon who used it successfully on thousands of patients—but at great personal cost: he was booted out of his professorship and became a laughingstock of English medical society. John Elsdaile, a medical officer with the East India Company, had better luck: He performed hundreds of operations, including amputations, “painlessly and with few fatalities” using mesmerism. At about the same time, James Braid, another English physician experimenting with the procedure renamed it “hypnosis,” after Hypnos, the Greco-Roman god of sleep.

In the 1880s Sigmund Freud visited France and decided to experiment with hypnosis in the fledgling field of psychology. He used it to treat neurotic disorders by helping patients remember events in their
past that they had either forgotten or repressed. But as he developed his method of psychoanalysis, he lost interest in hypnosis and eventually dumped it entirely.

It took 1,700 years to complete the Great Wall of China.

Despite Freud’s rejection, hypnotism continued to grow in popularity. By the mid-1950s the British and American Medical Associations had approved its use. Although hypnotism is seldom used as an anesthetic in surgery today—except in combination with pain-killing drugs—it is widely used to prepare patients for anesthesia, ease the pain of childbirth, lower blood pressure, combat headaches; and ease the fear associated with dental appointments, and has a variety of other applications. More than 15,000 physicians, dentists, and psychologists currently incorporate hypnotherapy into their practices.