Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader (43 page)

—Mail and Guardian
(UK)

NOW YOU SEE HIM...

“In a Miami courtroom, while the lawyer for defendant Raymond Jessi Snyder was vociferously protesting a prosecutor’s demand that Snyder be locked up pending trial because he was a ‘flight risk,’ the sly defendant slowly eased from his seat and bolted out the door. (He didn’t get far.)”

—
Miami Herald

HOW TO MAKE A 17-WEEK WAIT SEEM SHORT

“A British hospital patient has been told he’ll have to wait 192 years for a minor operation. Robert Smith, 48, has been sent a letter by Dewsbury District Hospital saying the waiting time is 9,999 weeks. The
Mirror
says bosses at the Mid-Yorkshire Hospital have apologized for the gaffe, blaming an administration error. A spokesman said: ‘We are happy to confirm no one has ever had to wait 9,999 weeks.’ Mr. Smith has now been told the waiting time for the operation to have a spot removed from beside his eye is actually ‘only’ 17 weeks.”

—
Ananova

RIDIN’ THAT TRAIN

“It started out as a tranquil night watching the sun set and the stars rise. But for three Charleston, South Carolina, young people, it turned into a harrowing ride atop a speeding train. Jack Lowther, 22, his 18-year-old girlfriend Jacklyn ‘Blair’ Gary, and Mary Allison Morris, 21, were watching the sky from a bridge Tuesday evening when they decided to climb aboard a parked freight car for a better view. They soon discovered that was a bad idea. ‘We were on top, and it started moving,’ said Lowther. ‘I tried to get everyone off the train, but it had already started to pick up speed.’ They lay down on top of a box car as the train reached speeds of over 50 mph, slipping under bridges that were too low for comfort. Although the reception was poor, Morris finally managed to call 911 on her cell phone. By the time the train slowed, it was about 22 miles from where their journey began. Deputies charged the three with trespassing. ‘I just want to tell everyone else not to try this,’ Lowther said. ‘It’s not fun.’”

—
Associated Press

What animal was the symbol of liberty in ancient Rome? The cat.

MONNOPOLY

“Parker Brothers admitted that for the past sixty years it has misspelled Marven Gardens as ‘Marvin’ Gardens on its popular Monopoly board game. The company said correcting the error would be too costly.”

—
More Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest

TOP-NOTCH EDUCASHUN

“A chain of private California schools that taught immigrants was ordered to stop handing out diplomas, state Attorney General Bill Lockyer said. Authorities seized the assets of California Alternative High School and asked a judge to stop the company’s 30 schools statewide from handing out ‘high school diplomas.’ The company, which charged its mainly Latino students $450 to $1,450 for a 10-week course, based its curriculum on a 54-page book that was riddled with errors. Among other things, students learned that: there are 53 United States; Congress has two houses—the Senate for Democrats and the House for Republicans; and that World War II occurred from 1938 to 1942.

“The company claims to have 78 locations nationwide and said it was actively expanding operations despite court orders blocking it from claiming the diplomas were ‘official.’”

—
Reuters

“Get your facts first, and then you may distort them as much as you please.”

—Mark Twain

In 1977, American car makers recalled more vehicles than they produced.

Perhaps the oddest theatrical superstition is the practice of wishing a performer a nasty injury as a way of saying “good luck.” What’s so lucky about breaking a leg?

B
ACKGROUND

Telling someone to “break a leg” is such a well-known theatrical custom that most people think it dates back centuries. In fact, it has been commonly used only since the 1930s, and its origins are unknown. Here are some possibilities:

•
Actors traditionally thank an audience by bending into a bow. The old military expression “take a knee,” which means to bow, may have been corrupted into “break a leg.”

•
The narrow curtains that cover the sides of the stage are sometimes called “legs.” An actor who gives a great performance may be summoned for several curtain calls, causing the mechanisms that raise and lower the legs to be overused and eventually break. The actor is wished a performance so good that it literally breaks a leg.

•
John Wilkes Booth, President Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, was also one of the 19th century’s most popular stage actors. After he shot Lincoln, he leaped to the stage of Ford’s Theatre. He escaped but broke his leg in the process.

•
In 1915 renowned French actress Sarah Bernhardt had a leg amputated but returned to the stage later that year. Invoking the spirit and memory of one of theater’s most beloved actresses is said to bring goodwill to a performer.

•
The German phrase
Hals und Beinbruch
means “good luck,” but it literally translates as “neck and leg break.” How did such a gruesome expression come to mean good luck?
Hals und beinbruch
is similar to the Hebrew expression
hatzlakha u-brakha
, which means “success and blessing.” The two expressions were probably linked by German Jewish immigrants who came to the United States in the early 20th century. The phrase may have come into theatrical usage from the many second-generation immigrants who worked in the entertainment industry, including the Marx Brothers, Jack Benny, and George Burns.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s first TV appearance was on
Romper Room
.

Ever since computers first became affordable in the early 1980s, viruses have been a threat. They have cost individuals, companies, and governments billions in software, security, data replacement, and lost productivity. Here are some of the most infamous viruses to date
.

E
LK CLONER (1981)

Richard Skrenta, a 15-year-old high school freshman, gave his friends some disks of computer games. But there was a catch: the disks could only be used 49 times. On the 50th attempt, the screen went blank and this poem appeared:

It will get on all your disks. It will infiltrate your chips Yes it’s Cloner!
It will stick to you like glue. It will modify RAM too Send in the Cloner!

What was intended as a prank turned out to be the first computer virus. Elk Cloner would hide in the computer’s memory and then attach itself to the next disk inserted in the computer. Any other computer using
that
disk would then get infected in turn.

Hundreds of computers were damaged, and Elk Cloner hung around for years. But Skrenta was never punished—viruses were so new that they were not yet perceived as the crimes they are today.

MICHELANGELO (1992)

Technicians in New Zealand found this virus on a computer in late 1991, but there was no damage—the virus wasn’t programmed to cause any destruction until the following March 6, the anniversary of Michelangelo’s birthday. On that date it would make it look like the entire computer had been erased.

Only a handful of computers had the Michelangelo virus until January 1992, when a computer manufacturer accidentally shipped 500 infected PCs and another unwittingly distributed 900 infected floppy disks. Computer experts still didn’t think it would spread very far, but then Reuters ran a story predicting that 25% of all American computers would be affected. Where’d they get that number? From anti-virus software manufacturers, who claimed Michelangelo would strike 20 million computers. When Doomsday arrived, though, the virus damaged only about 10,000 computers.

Frogs have no ribs.

Michelangelo is still floating in cyberspace, yet despite being programmed to attack computers every March 6, there have been no reports of it doing any harm since 1992. But because of the frenzy it created, anti-virus software is now a billion-dollar industry. And whoever unleashed the virus was never caught.

LOVE BUG (2000)

In 2000, computer users received e-mails with the subject line “ILOVEYOU.” When the recipient downloaded the accompanying attachment, the virus attacked the computer and sent itself to every e-mail addresses stored in the computer, starting a volatile chain reaction. Love Bug was first spotted in Asia but quickly spread worldwide. It disabled computers at the White House, the Pentagon, British Parliament, and many European e-mail servers. The damage was estimated at $10 billion.

Who did it? Police tracked down the culprits: Onel de Guzman and Reomel Ramones of the Philippines. But the Philippines had no laws against cyber crime, so despite the damage they caused, Guzman and Ramones went free. (Guzman was actually offered several computer programming jobs after he was cleared.)

The virus is now gone, but its method of distribution still lives: dozens of viruses have spread through e-mail with deceptive subject lines such as “You gotta read this,” “Important! Read carefully,” and even “How to protect yourself from the ILOVEYOU bug.”

CODE RED (2001)

Using Microsoft’s Internet server software, Code Red sent itself to e-mail addresses stored in the computers it infected, then flooded the Web with billions of megabytes of gobbledygook. Result: Web sites had text replaced with the phrase “hacked by Chinese.”

Code Red’s real goal: To infiltrate, flood, and shut down the White House Web site. That didn’t happen, but other major sites such as AT&T, Hotmail, and Federal Express all fell prey to it. At its peak, Code Red was infecting 2,000 computers a minute. Total cost of lost data and productivity: $1.2 billion. (It was rumored that the virus was the work of the Chinese government as part of a secret computer hacking war with the United States.) To date, nobody has been arrested for creating or spreading Code Red.

The term “hacker” was coined at MIT in 1961.

BLASTER (2003)

Also known as Lovsan, Blaster wasn’t technically a virus, it was a
worm
. A virus damages whatever computer is unlucky enough to accidentally cross its path, but a worm seeks out vulnerable computers and then infects them.

Blaster initially caused more headaches than harm. Once on a computer, it didn’t delete information, it messed with the operating system. A message appeared, counting down 60 seconds until the computer would shut down and restart. This on-and-off cycle would go on forever. And if you shut off the computer manually, all data could be lost. But Blaster actually had a second, more devious goal: to shut down Microsoft’s Web site. Microsoft fought back, successfully blocking Blaster from its site. Yet despite Microsoft’s efforts, 500,000 computers lost data. And despite the offer of a $500,000 reward for information leading to the parties responsible for Blaster, their identities remain a secret.

MORE VIRUSES

PC-Write Trojan (1986).
Infected computers while pretending to be a popular word-processing program.

Christmas Worm (1987).
Hit IBM mainframes and replicated at a rate of 500,000 times per hour.

AIDS Trojan (1989).
Disguised as an AIDS information program, it crippled hard drives then demanded money for the decoder information.

Little Black Book (1990).
Synchronized viruses designed to infect AT&T’s long distance switching system.

Tequila (1991).
Swiss in origin, it was the first virus that could change itself to avoid detection in infected computers.

Chernobyl (1999).
Programmed to delete hard drives on April 26, 1999, the 13th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident.

Melissa (1999).
Infected computers via a fake Microsoft Word document sent by e-mail. Caused more than $80 million in damage. Its creator, David Smith, went to jail for 26 months.

Trojan.Xombe (2004).
Posing as an official Windows upgrade message, stole personal information stored in computers.

King George III survived two assassination attempts...in one day.

Stuff you probably didn’t know about
The Simpsons.

Chief Wiggum is based on actor Edward G. Robinson.