Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader (42 page)

Q: What does “100% Natural” signify on food labels? A: Absolutely nothing.

POLAVISION

Brilliant Idea:
In the mid-1970s, Polaroid spent $250 million researching and developing Polavision, the world’s first instant motion picture system. It went on sale in 1978.

Oops:
What did the company have to show for itself after spending all that money? Not much—the picture was grainy, the movies were only 2-1/2 minutes long, and they didn’t have sound. The cameras cost $675—in 1978—and you also had to buy a special viewing screen because they couldn’t be viewed on a TV. Competing Super 8 cameras sold for a fraction of the cost, made longer movies with a much better picture, and had sound. As if that wasn’t competition enough, video cameras were just around the corner. Polavision never had a chance: By the time Polaroid scrapped the product in 1979 it had lost so much money—$68.5 million—that shareholders forced Edwin Land, the company founder and CEO, into retirement.

ZAPMAIL

Brilliant Idea:
In 1984 Federal Express launched a new delivery service called Zapmail. Instead of physically shipping important documents across the country, the company would transmit them by satellite from one FedEx office to another, then deliver them by courier in two hours or less. Price: $35 for up to ten pages. Sure, the company would have to launch satellites and build its own network of ground stations, but since it was shipping fewer documents by plane it hoped to save a fortune on jumbo jets.

Oops:
Federal Express failed to take one thing into consideration: the prices of fax machines—$3,500 or more in 1984—were already beginning to drop, and within just a few years they’d be so cheap that any business could afford them. Too late for Federal Express—by the time it pulled the plug on ZapMail in 1986, the company had zapped an estimated $500 million. (As soon as Federal Express announced it was ending the service, its stock price shot up 18%.)

Last state to abolish flogging as a legal punishment: Delaware...in 1972.

We printed this article in black and white (just in case you’re color-blind)
.

E
YE SEE THE LIGHT

Why are some people “color-blind,” and what exactly does it mean? To answer that, we have to answer a bigger question: How do we see things in the first place? The simple answer is, we don’t actually see
things
, we see the light that reflects off of them. That reflected light goes through a lens and hits the retina in the back of the eye. Special cells in the retina, called
photoreceptors
, convert that light into nerve signals that are sent to the brain’s visual center. And the fact that seeing objects is actually seeing light explains how we see in color, because light
is
color. More precisely, light travels in wavelengths, and the different wavelengths are interpreted by our brains as different colors.

So back to the first question: Why are some people color-blind, and what exactly does that mean?

EYE SEE
SOME OF
THE LIGHT

There are two main types of photoreceptor cells in the retina:
rods
and
cones
(so called because of their shapes). Rods detect different amounts of light (bright to dark), and cones detect different wavelengths of light—meaning different colors.

Human cone cells come in three different types. One type contains a pigment that responds to short-wavelength light (the blue part of the spectrum), another to medium-wavelength light (the green part), and the third to long-wavelength light (the reds). Color-blindness is simply the condition of having defective or missing cone cells. Most commonly, people inherit the trait from their parents, but it can also be caused by injury, illness, and aging, and it comes in many different forms.

•
Protanopia:
Greens look like browns; reds look more like beiges and appear darker than they actually are. Violet and purple are seen as shades of blue because the red in them can’t be seen.

•
Deuteranopia:
Deuteranopes lack medium-wavelength cones (the greens) and have red/green symptoms similar to protanopia.

When asked to name a color, 60% of any group of people will name the color “red.”

This is the most common form of color-blindness.

•
Tritanopia:
An uncommon form of color-blindness—the lack of short-wavelength cones (the blues). Blues and greens are difficult to distinguish, and yellows can appear as shades of red.

•
Blue cone monochromacy:
Having only one type of functioning cones—the blues. Someone with blue cone monochromacy can see few colors, but otherwise has good vision in normal light.

•
Rod monochromacy:
A very rare condition and the only one for which the term “color-blindness” is actually accurate. Also known as
maskun
, this is the condition of having only rods—no functioning cones at all. A rod monochromat can’t see any color at all. The world is black, white, and shades of gray.

COLOR-BLINDNESS FACTS

•
About 8% of all men have some form of color deficiency; about half of 1% of all women do.

•
Humans are all born color-blind. Cone cells don’t begin functioning until a baby is about four months old.

•
Color-blindness is also known as Daltonism, named after John Dalton, who wrote the first scientific paper about the condition (which he had) in 1794. In 1995, 150 years after his death, researchers determined that Dalton suffered from deuteranopia. How? They did a DNA analysis of his preserved eyeball.

•
Complete color-blindness, or rod monochromacy, is extremely rare—except on the Pacific island of Pohnpei, where 8% of the population has it.

•
Color-detecting cones work best in bright light. In very dim light only non-color-detecting rods are used, which is why everything seems to be in black and white in dim light.

•
Rods are more numerous in the periphery of the retina. In dim light, use your peripheral vision—it sees better.

•
Most mammals are dichromatic: they have two types of cone cells and can see fewer colors than we can. Honeybees, like humans, have three types. But honeybees can see colors in the ultraviolet range; humans can’t.

•
The mantis shrimp’s eye has at least 12 different cone cell types for detecting different colors. Exactly how many colors they can see is still unknown.

Q: For what event in February 1964 did evangelist Billy Graham break his strict rule against watching TV on Sunday? A: The Beatles first appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show
.

From our “Dustbin of History” files, here’s the pungent tale of two midwest states whose pride and honor were once challenged...by a slab of stinky cheese
.

I
T AIN’T EASY BEING CHEESEY

It began in the winter of 1935 when a doctor in Independence, Iowa, prescribed an odd medicine to an ailing farm wife: Limburger cheese. The doctor figured the heavily aromatic cheese would help clear the woman’s clogged sinuses. (If you don’t know what Limburger smells like, give it a whiff the next time you’re at the supermarket.) So the order was put through to Monroe, Wisconsin, to send some Limburger cheese—post haste.

Why Monroe? Swiss cheesemakers first arrived there in 1845. At the time, Wisconsin was in the depths of an economic depression and cheese helped pull them out of it. By 1910, Wisconsin had become the cheese-making capital of the United States, producing more cheese than any other state. And Monroe was the Limburger capital of Wisconsin.

THE BATTLE LINES ARE DRAWN

Monroe’s postmaster, John Burkhard, approved the delivery and sent it on its way. But the mail carrier in Independence, Iowa, who delivered the Limburger was so offended by the stench wafting through his roadster that he refused to deliver it. Citing a postal rule that said mail would only be delivered if it “did not smell objectionable,” Independence’s postmaster, Warren Miller, concurred without examining or even smelling the cheese. He had it sent back to Monroeon the grounds that it could “fell an ox at twenty paces.”

Burkhard took it personally; to insult Limburger is to insult not just Monroe, but all of Wisconsin and its proud cheese heritage. So Burkhard rewrapped the package and sent it back to Iowa. Miller promptly returned it to Wisconsin. War was brewing.

THE BATTLE OF DUBUQUE

Burkhard took his gripe all the way to the United States Postmaster General in Washington, D.C. At first, he couldn’t understand what all of the fuss was about. So Burkhard sent him some Limburger. The Postmaster General then decided that, yes, the cheese smelled bad, but no, it wasn’t hazardous. And the war was over, right? Wrong.

By this time the press had sniffed out the story. At a time when the nation was mired in the Great Depression and Hitler was rising to power in Germany, a story about smelly cheese was a breath of fresh air. And unwilling to give in, postmaster Burkhard challenged postmaster Miller to a “cheese-sniffing duel”—if Miller could sit at a table and not wretch from the stench of freshly-cut Limburger, then he would never again raise a stink about Wisconsin or its cheese. Miller accepted. Dozens of people from each town—as well as a throng of reporters—showed up at the Julien Hotel in Dubuque, Iowa, on the cold afternoon of March 8, 1935, to witness the standoff.

A Duel to the Breath

The two men sat across from each other at a table. While flash-bulbs flickered and onlookers whispered, Burkhard placed a box on the table, unwrapped it, and produced a very strong sample of his state’s pride and joy, praising not only its medicinal qualities, but boasting that nothing on Earth tasted better with beer. The tension was so thick that you could cut it with a knife. Famed
Milwaukee Journal
reporter Richard S. Davis sent out a dispatch calling it a “duel to the breath.”

As Burkhard prepared to push the slab of cheese over to Miller, he offered Miller a clothespin and a gas mask. But Miller just shook his head and meekly surrendered. “I won’t need that clothes-pin,” he lamented, “I haven’t any sense of smell.”

The crowd gasped. The battle was over before it began. Burkhard was immediately declared the winner and Miller had to agree to allow any and all Wisconsin cheese safe passage throughout Iowa’s postal routes. The next day newspapers in 30 states ran a picture of the olfactarily-challenged Miller looking bewildered next to a piece of steaming Limburger. And
now
the war was over, right? Wrong. The final battle was yet to come.

Did their pee smell? Romans cultivated asparagus in 200 B.C.

THE BATTLE OF BEAVER DAM

While Burkhard was basking in victory, something he’d said about Limburger at that table in Dubuque—that nothing tasted better with beer—was churning through Miller’s head. Every good Iowan knew that the best food to eat with beer is smoked whitefish, not some stinky piece of cheese. Miller just couldn’t let it go. So he challenged Burkhard with another contest: a fight for the title of “Best
Snack
in the World.” Once again the press got whiff of the food feud, and they convened at the neutral site chosen for the contest: the American Legion hall in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin.

This confrontation was even more serious than the first—now there were judges. And with so much at stake, both sides used underhanded tactics: they bribed the judges with beer. The fish-heads bought a round, then the cheese-heads. And once all pallets were properly whetted, the showdown began.

Carnage

First came the sliced Limburger with beer. Then the Iowans gave the judges smoked whitefish...and more beer. The battle raged on: Limburger and beer, whitefish and beer. Limburger and beer, white-fish and beer. Finally, when the judges could eat or drink no more, they sent the least-inebriated member of their panel to the podium: “The judgeth have reached a dethision. It was unamus... unans...they all said the same darned thing! Cheese’n beer s’wunnerful. Fishes’n beer s’wunnerful too. But when you have Limburger cheese
and
smoked whitefish and beer, heck, it don’t get no better’n that!”

Both sides were declared victorious, Burkhard and Miller retained their respective states’ honor, and Limburger cheese had risen from being referred to as “hazardous material” to holding the co-title of “Best Snack in the World.”

VICTORY PARADE

That October, Monroe, Wisconsin, held its annual Cheese Day parade. All of the press coverage from the Limburger cheese war made it the biggest Cheese Day ever. Fifty thousand people showed up to bask in the glory—including the farmer’s wife (who had healed quite nicely). Warren Miller came all the way from Iowa and was given a place of honor in the parade—right next to his

Last movie ever released on laserdisc:
Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace
.

More tales of outrageous blunders
.

D
ON’T BEE STUPID

“In Gerbach, Germany, a roofing worker was attacked by a swarm of wasps. To protect himself, he used his blowtorch against the bees, setting one of the insects on fire. The wasp then flew back to its nest, which was located in the rafters, and set the house on fire.”