Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader (86 page)

CAPTURING THE UNICORN

• “It is said that unicorns above all other creatures do reverence virgins and young maids, and that many times at the sight of them, unicorns grow tame, and come and sleep beside them, for there is in their nature a certain savor by which the unicorns are allured and delighted.”

• “The Indian and Ethiopian hunters are said to use a stratagem to take the beast. They take a goodly strong and beautiful young man, whom they dress in the apparel of a woman, besetting him with divers odoriferous flowers and spices.”

• “The man so adorned, they set him in the mountains or the woods where the unicorn hunts, so as the wind may carry the savor to the beast, and in the mean season, the other hunters hide themselves.”

As a person ages, the first sense to go is the sense of smell.

• Deceived by the outward shape of a woman and the sweet smells, the unicorn comes unto the young man without fear and so suffers his head to be covered and wrapped within his large sleeves, never stirring but lying still and asleep, as in his most acceptable repose.”

• “Then when the hunters by the sign of the young man perceive the unicorn fast and secure, they come upon him and by force cut off his horn and send him away alive.”

PROOF THAT UNICORNS EXIST

Why was Edward Topsell so sure that unicorns roamed the earth? A matter of faith. Although he’d never seen a unicorn, Topsell believed that to doubt its existence was to deny the very existence of God:

• “That there is such a beast Scripture itself witnesses, for David thus speaks in Psalm 92: ‘My horn shall be lifted up like the horn of a unicorn.’”

• “All divines that have ever written have not only concluded that there is a unicorn, but also affirm the similitude between the kingdom of David and the horn of the unicorn, for as the horn of the unicorn is wholesome to all beasts and creatures, so should the kingdom of David be in the generation of Christ.”

• “Do we think that David would compare the virtue of his kingdom and the powerful redemption of the world unto a thing that is not or is uncertain and fantastical? Likewise, in many other places of Scripture, we will have to traduce God, Himself, if there is no unicorn in the world.”

MISC. BATHROOM NEWS

Denver, Sept. 29, 1993
—“Portable potties at the construction site at Denver International Airport stink so much that someone has been setting them on fire. Five have been burned in the last month.

“One of the two burned on Monday bore a graffiti warning: ‘If you don’t fix the toilet paper dispenser, I’ll burn down another one. Signed, The Flame Man.’

“Last week, a similar message on a charred toilet warned officials to ‘Keep the toilets clean or they’ll get burned.’”

Fifty-four percent of U.S. women say they’d rather “get run over by a truck” than gain 150 lbs.

Monsters have always been hits with moviemakers and their audiences, but “The Outer Limits” (which aired from 1963 to 1965) marked the first time TV viewers got a “monster of the week.” The show was more than that, though; the lighting and cinematography gave the show an offbeat, intensely atmospheric look—and the writing was impressively literate. Despite its lukewarm ratings in its first run it remains one of TV’s most memorable shows.

H
OW IT STARTED

In 1961, Leslie Stevens came up with an idea for a science-fiction show about “the awe and mystery of the universe.” He brought it up in a conversation with “packager programmer” Dan Melnick, who agreed it would make a good show—as long as it had monsters in it to make it commercial. And “The Outer Limits” was born.

Well, actually
Please Stand By
was born, because that was the title of the proposed pilot that Stevens sold to ABC in 1962. Filming began December 2, with Joe Stefano producing. Early on, ABC requested the addition of a Rod Serling-like host to speak directly to the audience. Stefano didn’t want one, so he compromised: he created an unseen presence called “the Control Voice” which introduced and commented on each episode. It was Stefano’s excuse to editorialize. However, 1962 was a bad time to be flashing “Please Stand By” on screen while an “ominous voice” took control of viewers’ TV sets. Only a few months earlier, the Cuban missile crisis had brought us to the brink of World War III. ABC guessed that an already frightened public might mistake the show for an official announcement and create an Orson Welles-type panic.

So the name was changed to “Beyond Control” and then to “The Outer Limits.” The series finally began shooting on May 22, 1963, and premiered 3½ months later. The show only ran until January 16, 1965.

71% of college-educated women—but only 44% of non-college-educated women—breastfeed.

SPECIAL EFFECTS

To the producers of
The Outer Limits
, the monsters were metaphors; it was the contemporary themes of the stones that mattered, not the costumes and special effects. This was convenient, because their “creature budget” was only $10,000 to $40,000 per episode. They had to be very creative when it came to the scary stuff. For example:

• The Andromedan from the episode “Galaxy Being” was a guy in a brown wetsuit coated with glycerin and oil, and negative-reversed to produce a shimmering
white
monster.

• In one scary episode, poisonous alien plants take root on the earth and shoot deadly spores into the air. But the audience wouldn’t have been too frightened if they had known the “spores” were actually puffed wheat cereal!

• By consensus, the most ridiculous
Outer Limits
monster ever created was the Megasoid. It consisted of “a floppy velour gorilla suit (through which the actor’s T-shirt could frequently be seen), a dubbed-in German shepherd growl, and a “recycled bird mask” from a previous episode.

CAN YOU BEAR IT?

Although Stevens and Stefano had lofty ideas about what they were trying to accomplish in their stories, ABC only cared about the monsters, which Stefano always referred to as “the bears.” He explained: “In the old vaudeville days, when things were going wrong and the audience was getting bored, out would come a comic in a bear outfit. That’s what we do in each of our shows—‘Bring on the bear!’”

HOT PROP-ERTY

Eleven years after “The Outer Limits” last showing, Robin Williams appeared as Mork from Ork, wearing a helmet used in an “Outer Limits” episode called “The Specimen.”

CENSORED

“The Cats,” an episode in which aliens “take possession of the bodies of household pets to invade the Earth,” was never shown. ABC feared that viewers who had cats at home might become scared of them.”

IRS fact: 20 million taxpayers a year wait until April to begin filling out their tax returns.

REALLY SCARY

“The Outer Limits’” producer Joseph Stefano also wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film,
Psycho
.

TRUE CONFESSIONS

Instructions given to Outer Limits writers: “Each play should have one splendid, staggering, shuddering effect that induces awe, wonder, tolerable terror, or even merely conversation and argument.”

THE CONTROL VOICE

An announcer named Vic Perrin supplied the narrator’s voice (“There is nothing wrong with your television set...Do not attempt to adjust the picture...) Here’s the sort of thing viewers heard him say every week:

Here, in the bright, clustered loneliness of the billion, billion stars, loneliness can be an exciting, voluntary thing, unlike the loneliness man suffers on earth. Here, deep in the starry nowhere, a man can be as one with space and time; preoccupied, yet not indifferent; anxious, yet at peace. His name is Joseph Reardon. He is, in this present year, thirty years old. This is the first time he has made this journey alone...”

OUR FAVORITE EPISODES

“The Architects of Fear.”
Robert Culp, a scientist, is selected by idealistic cronies to frighten the nations of Earth into uniting against a common enemy. The plan: He’ll be transformed into a monster, land a flying saucer at the U.N., and threateningly announce he is from the planet Theta. Instead, the saucer crashes off course, and he’s shot by a bunch of hunters.

“The Man Who Never Was Born.
” Reardon, a time traveler, discovers that in the year 2148 the human population has been wiped out by an alien germ which was nurtured by a man named Cabot. So he and a disfigured humanoid from the future travel back in

“In the year 2000, Twinkies from 1973 will still be fresh.”

—
Conan O’Brien

63% of shopping-mall Santas have a college degree...and 29% are fluent in sign language.

When companies want to drum up some new business to get favorable publicity, they sponsor promotions. But sometimes things don’t work out as planned. The businesses wind up with angry customers and egg on their face. Here are three promos that companies wish they could take back.

R
ADIO DAZE

The Promotion:
On April 6, 1994, KYNG-FM radio in Fort Worth, Texas, announced that it had hidden $100 worth of $5 and $10 bills in books in the fiction section of the Fort Worth Central Library. The station said it organized the publicity stunt “to boost public interest in the library.”

What Happened:
The station expected only about 30 people to show up and look for the cash, but when a rumor surfaced that there was $10,000 hidden in the books, more than 500 people descended on the library looking for the loot, sparking a near riot in the fiction section.

Backfire!
“Books were sailing, and elbows were flying, and people were climbing the shelves,” the library’s spokesperson told reporters. “To a librarian, that’s sacrilege.” More than 3,500 books were knocked off the shelves in the process, and hundreds were damaged. KYNG apologized for the incident, agreed to pay for the damaged books, and reimbursed the library for the time the librarians spent putting them back on the shelves.

PEPSI HITS THE SPOT

The Promotion:
In 1993, Pepsi launched their “Number Fever” contest promotion in the Philippines. It promised instant cash of up to 1 million pesos ($37,000) to contestants who held bottle caps with the correct 3-digit winning number.

What Happened:
Thanks to a “computer software glitch,” the company accidentally printed and circulated 800,000 caps bearing the number 349...and on May 25, 1992, that number was selected at random as the winning number. Thousands of winners came forward to collect their prizes. Pepsi admitted its mistake, but agreed to pay only $18 to anyone holding one of the caps. They called it a “goodwill” gesture.

74% of U.S. teens believe in the supernatural...and 16% believe in the Loch Ness monster.

Backfire!
Pepsi spent about $10 million paying off more than 500,000 people...but many of the winners refused to cooperate. They were
really
angry. The
Chicago Tribune
reported in August 1993:

Irate winners rioted at some of the plants. Others attacked bottling plants and delivery trucks with grenades and firebombs. At least 37 trucks have been burned in such attacks and a bottling plant stopped operation because of grenade damage. A teacher and a 5-year-old girl died when a grenade bounced off a truck and exploded near a crowd on a street.

THE REAL THING

The Promotion:
In the summer of 1990, Coca-Cola launched the largest consumer promotion in its history—a $100 million ad campaign featuring 750,000 high-tech “MagiCans.” These seemingly ordinary 12-ounce cans of Coke actually contained millions of dollars in cash and prizes. “When a buyer pops the top,” the
Wall Street Journal
wrote, “a device rises through the opening in the can and displays legal tender—anywhere from $1 to $100—or a scroll of paper, redeemable for prizes. To give the cans the feel of the real product, Coke has partially filled them with chlorinated water.”

What Happened:
In May, an 11-year-old Massachusetts boy opened a defective MagiCan and drank the water. His mother thought the can had been tampered with because it was filled with “a clear liquid...tasting and smelling like cleaning solution.” She called the police...who found the malfunctioning prize-delivery mechanism and a soggy $5 bill.