Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader (80 page)

ENGLISH SIGNS AND LABELS SEEN IN JAPAN

“For Restrooms, go back to your behind.”

—In a restaurant

“Danger! This toy is being made for the extreme priority the good looks. The little part which suffocates when the sharp part gets hurt is swallowed is contained generously. Only the person who can take responsibility by itself is to play.”

—Warning label on a children’s toy

“Soft Drinks: Cola, Ginger Ale, Milk, Flesh Juice”

—On a restaurant menu

“My Fannie”

—Toilet paper brand name

Q: What was the brand name of the first television set? A: The Philco Predicta.

Our next installment in the history of (almost) everything that ever happened
.

PART IV: FROM THE DARK AGES TO THE NEW WORLD

•
850 A.D.
This is the Islamic golden age (Europe will remain in the Dark Ages for centuries), marked by continuing advances in the arts and sciences. Persian mathematician al-Khwarizmi writes
Kitab Al-Jabr wa al-muqabalah
, from which we get the term
algebra
.

•
871
Muslims now dominate sea trade; Islam spreads to southeast Asia. Alfred the Great becomes the first king of England.

•
930
The
Althing
, the oldest functioning parliament in world, is established in Iceland.

•
1000
Mississippian culture flourishes in North America. Native chiefs run territorial governments. Maize, beans, and squash are cultivated. The largest city, Cahokia (near present-day St. Louis) has a population of 10,000. Viking Leif Eriksson lands in North America.

•
1066
The Norman Conquest: William of Normandy, a French duke, conquers the English and becomes king, creating England’s first stable monarchy. Many historians call this the true beginning of English history.

•
1075
Turkish Muslims take Jerusalem.

•
1095
The Christian Crusades begin, a series of nine holy wars started in Europe and sanctioned by the pope to reclaim the Holy Land from Muslims. They will last until 1291.

•
1206
Temüjin unites the Mongol peoples and becomes the “Universal Ruler”—Genghis Khan. He begins making conquests with a very mobile—and very brutal—army. In less than 100 years, he and his descendants will expand their small empire into the largest the world has ever known, extending from the Sea of Japan, through China and India, all the way to eastern Europe.

Garden State? Newark, New Jersey, was the site of the first asphalt paving in 1870.

•
1215
English barons force King John to adopt the
Magna Carta
(“Great Charter”), a seminal document in the history of constitutional government. Its provisions limited the power of royalty and guaranteed an individual’s basic civil liberties. It is considered a predecessor of the American Bill of Rights.

•
1250
The Shona people build hundreds of cities in southwest Africa. The most elaborate: Great Zimbabwe, an 1,800-acre stone complex. Roger Bacon makes the earliest gunpowder recipe in Europe.

•
1300
Mayan civilization collapses. Islam becomes the official religion of the Mongol Empire, further helping its spread through Asia. Spectacles are invented in Italy.

•
1325
Osman I rules the Turks. He is regarded as the father of the Ottoman Empire, which will thrive until World War I. In Mexico, the Aztec Empire begins with the founding of Tenochtitlán.

•
1347
The bubonic plague sweeps across Europe, killing 25 million people.

•
1400
Europe emerges from the Dark Ages with an unparalleled era of advances in art, literature, and science known as the Renaissance (generally regarded as beginning in Florence, Italy).

•
1450
Johannes Gutenberg becomes the first in the West to invent movable type and a printing press, making possible the mass production of books. Constantinople is taken by the Ottoman Turks, ending the Byzantine (eastern Roman) Empire.

•
1478
The bloody Spanish Inquisition is formed to rid the nation of “heretics” and enemies of the Catholic Church. Incan civilization covers the entire western coast of South America; the Aztec Empire covers most of Central America and Mexico.

•
1492
Christopher Columbus sails west from Spain searching for a new route to India and accidentally “discovers” the New World.

And then what happened? A whole lot of stuff—Galileo, baseball, Elvis, Shakespeare, coffee, Canada, the Pilgrims
, Huckleberry Finn,
blue jeans, the French Revolution
, Gilligan’s Island
...but we ran out of room, so we’ll save it for another
Bathroom Reader.
See ya!

What’s special about August 21, 2017? It’s the next time a solar eclipse will be visible in the U.S.

Were you a fan of the TV series
Kung Fu
? You aren’t alone—it was one of the most popular shows of its day. Along with the films of Bruce Lee, it helped launch the martial arts craze of the 1970s
.

E
AST SIDE STORY

In the late 1960s, a man named Ed Spielman was studying radio and television production at Brooklyn College in New York City. He was also a martial arts buff and a big fan of Japanese movies. One day a martial arts instructor he knew happened to tell him in passing that his wife, who was trained in the Chinese martial art of kung fu, could knock him to the ground using only one or two fingers. Intrigued, Spielman began reading up on kung fu.

Spielman earned money writing comedy with his friend Howard Friedlander, who was also fascinated by the Far East. Whenever Spielman read anything interesting about kung fu, he shared it with Friedlander.

Friedlander had a favorite tale about a man who travels through China and meets up with a warrior-monk from the Shaolin temple, where kung fu has been practiced for more than 6,000 years. One afternoon the two men were walking down Broadway toward Times Square when Friedlander stopped suddenly, turned to Spielman, and said, “Ed, why don’t we write an
Eastern
Western? We can take the monk from the temple and place him in the West.”

RAISING CAINE

The pair set to work writing a film screenplay, and in early 1970 they finished a story about a half-Caucasian, half-Chinese Shaolin monk named Kwai Chang Caine who flees to the American West after he accidentally kills the nephew of the emperor of China. When Caine gets to the United States, he learns that he has a half brother, Danny Caine, and for much of the rest of the screenplay Caine searches for his brother.

Meanwhile, the Warner Bros. studio was looking for ways to use its Old West film sets now that Westerns were declining in popularity. Spielman and Friedlander’s script seemed to fit this need, so the studio bought it in late 1970 and made plans for a feature film...only to shelve the idea indefinitely in 1971. Reason: According to studio spokesmen,
Kung Fu
was too violent, not to mention too expensive to film. Besides, they said, the Eastern themes were too “esoteric” for American audiences.

Scientists believe a 1% drop in ozone levels causes up to a 6% rise in skin cancer cases.

A few months later, Harvey Frand, the Warner Bros. liaison between the studio’s feature film and television departments, happened to read the
Kung Fu
script and was impressed. He pitched it to the ABC network as an original movie-of-the-week, and they bought the idea and turned it into a 90-minute film.

SPLIT PERSONALITY

Since Caine was half-Caucasian and half-Chinese, casting either a white actor or an Asian actor in the part would have worked. Two actors were considered: Bruce Lee, then best known for the role of Kato in the
Green Hornet
TV series, and David Carradine, son of screen legend John Carradine. Carradine was the calmer, more serene of the two actors, and the creators thought he would make a better Caine than the tense, energetic Lee. (Besides, studio executives worried that American audiences would not be interested in a series with an Asian male lead.) Carradine got the part.

When the TV film aired on February 22, 1972, 33% of the American viewing audience tuned in to see it. In those days people had only the big three networks to choose from, along with an independent channel or two. Still, getting one in three viewers to tune in to a brand-new show was impressive.
Kung Fu
had something for everyone: peaceniks liked the fact that Caine lived his life according to an Eastern philosophy of nonviolence, and action fans loved how the bad guys got a beating at least once in every show. ABC ordered four more episodes, and when these pulled in large audiences, the network ordered 15 more.

IT’S A FAD!

Kung Fu
’s timing couldn’t have been better—Americans were beginning to take an interest in martial arts, thanks in large part to the guy who
didn’t
get the part of Caine, Bruce Lee. By the time Lee got the news that he’d lost the part to Carradine, he was already in Hong Kong filming the first of the “chop-socky” martial arts films that would make him an international star. That caused Hollywood to take a second look, and in 1973 Bruce Lee made
Enter the Dragon
for Warner Bros. Then, just weeks before
Enter the Dragon
was scheduled to premiere, Lee died suddenly from cerebral edema, or swelling of the brain. He was 32.

President George W. Bush spent a summer selling sporting goods for Sears.

By then
Kung Fu
had been on the air for several months, and the combination of the TV show and Lee’s movies—made all the more popular by his untimely death—helped launch the martial arts craze of the 1970s. People watched
Kung Fu
on TV, went to see chop-socky movies, and signed up for martial arts classes in greater numbers than ever before (or since). Elvis got a black belt. Kids wore
Kung Fu
T-shirts and read
Kung Fu
comic books and pulp novels while eating sandwiches out of
Kung Fu
lunchboxes. In 1974, when a singer named Carl Douglas spent 10 minutes recording what was supposed to be a B-side song called “Kung Fu Fighting,” it went all the way to #1 on the
Billboard
pop chart. The song got it right—everybody
was
kung fu fighting.

KEEPING IT REAL

•
The creators of
Kung Fu
were sticklers for authenticity, so they inserted real-life traditions from kung fu and other martial arts wherever they could. Walking across rice paper is a part of traditional ninja training in Japan, and snatching a pebble from the master’s hand was inspired by a similar practice at the Shaolin monastery.

•
Another scene taken from real life: the one where Caine, in his final act before leaving the temple, walks down a long corridor and lifts a red hot urn filled with coals with his wrists, branding a tiger and a dragon into his skin. Monks at the Shaolin temple ran a similar gauntlet: as they walked down a long corridor, they dodged acid dropped from the ceiling and spears thrust through holes in the walls and floors. If they made it to the end of the corridor, they branded themselves by lifting the urn with their arms or, if they needed to, with their stomach. “There’s more to a disciple’s leaving the temple than branding his arms,” Carradine says. “We left the rest out because we doubted whether anyone would believe it.”

KEEPING TRACK

Even when
Kung Fu
episodes are shown out of sequence, there are visual cues that viewers can use to place each episode in its proper chronological place in the series’ three-year run:

There are no rivers in Saudi Arabia.

•
Carradine shaved his head at the start of the series and didn’t cut his hair again until the final episodes. The longer Carradine’s hair, the later the episode appears in the series.

•
When Bruce Lee died in 1973, Carradine changed the color of the shirt he wore from brown to orange-yellow.

•
The original martial arts advisor for the show was not a genuine Shaolin master, but he was eventually replaced with someone who was, which helped make the kung fu action sequences more authentic. Carradine marked the change by having Caine lose his signature fedora hat. “If you see me without a hat, it’s genuine kung fu,” he says.

BEHIND THE SCENES

•
Spielman based the character of the blind, sympathetic Master Po on his grandfather, a Russian immigrant. “He was a moral and spiritual man. When he died,” Spielman says. “I was only a teenager, too immature to thank him or tell him how much I loved him. The relationship between Master Po and young Caine was my way of doing that.”

•
Actor Keye Luke wore special opaque contact lenses to make him appear blind. He could see out of a tiny hole drilled into each lens, but other than that, he really was almost blind when he had them on, and he tended to leave them on all day—even when he wasn’t filming a scene—to help him “get into character.”

NOT AS THEY SEEMED

•
One of the most famous scenes in the series is when Caine arrives as a young orphan boy at the Shaolin temple and is accepted as a student. Master Kan, who runs the temple, points to a pebble in his open palm and tells Caine, “As quickly as you can... snatch the pebble from my hand.” Caine tries and fails, and Master Kan says to him, “When you can take the pebble from my hand, it will be time for you to leave.” Filming the scene was tougher than you might think—actor Philip Ahn’s reflexes were so slow that he couldn’t stop Radames Pera from grabbing the pebble. Finally after about 15 takes, director Jerry Thorpe told Pera to signal with his left hand before grabbing with his right.