Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Golden Plunger Awards Read online

  Movie taglines aren’t always out to scare you, though. Sometimes they want to say just enough to get audiences excited to learn more about the characters in the story. These are the best enticements to spend a little time with someone who’s a little different.

  • “I hate him! I love him! He’s a scoundrel! He’s a saint! He’s crazy! He’s a genius!” Citizen Kane (1941)

  • “Jim Stark . . . a kid from a ‘good’ family—what makes him tick . . . like a bomb?” Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

  • “This is Benjamin. He’s a little worried about his future.” The Graduate (1967)

  • “Not since the dawn of time has America experienced a man like Howard Beale!” Network (1976)

  • “Nobody knows Rupert Pupkin, but after 11:30 tonight no one will ever forget him.” The King of Comedy (1983)

  • “If adventure has a name, it must be Indiana Jones.” Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)

  • “The story of a rebel and his bike.” Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985)

  • “His story will touch you, even though he can’t.” Edward Scissorhands (1990)

  • “You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll hurl!” Wayne’s World (1992)

  • “If you can’t be famous . . . be infamous.” Chicago (2004)

  MASTERS OF HYPE

  They may overstate their case, but there’s no denying these taglines have a point.

  • “The most awesome thriller of all time.” King Kong (1933)

  • “The more he yearns for a woman’s arms . . . the fiercer he lusts for the treasure that cursed them all!” The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

  • “They had a date with fate in Casablanca!” Casablanca (1942)

  • “His whole life was a million-to-one shot.” Rocky (1976)

  • “They’re young. They’re in love . . . and they kill people.” Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

  • “It’s time to kick some asteroid.” Armageddon (1998)

  • “On my command—unleash hell!” Gladiator (2000)

  KEEP IT SIMPLE

  Sometimes you need to get right to the point and sum up the entire movie in one short line. It may seem like the easiest way to go, but it’s probably the most difficult to get right. Here are the ones that did it best:

  • “Simple. Powerful. Unforgettable.” High Noon (1952)

  • “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” Love Story (1970)

  • “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away . . .” Star Wars (1977)

  • “He is afraid. He is alone. He is three million light years from home.” E.T. (1982)

  • “The first casualty of war is innocence.” Platoon (1986)

  • “Can two friends sleep together and still love each other in the morning?” When Harry Met Sally (1989)

  • “The story of two people who got married, met, and then fell in love.” Green Card (1990)

  • “One ring to rule them all.” The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

  • “Bigger, squarer, spongier!” The SpongeBob Square Pants Movie (2004)

  • “Love is a force of nature.” Brokeback Mountain (2005)

  “What does the Academy Award mean?

  I don’t think it means much of anything.”

  —Sally Field, after winning the Best Actress

  Oscar for Norma Rae (1980)

  THE PERSONAL ASSISTANT AWARD

  Baboon Jack, the Signalman

  James Wide nearly lost his job twice, but a trusted

  baboon named Jack saved him both times.

  OUCH!

  Railway guard James Wide earned his nickname, “Jumper,” because he liked to jump from one railway car to another—often while they were still moving. He worked in the town of Uitenhage, South Africa, during the late 19th century, and he did his job well, even if he had an unorthodox way of doing it. But jumping from car to car was a dangerous game, and one day he paid a terrible price for it.

  Wide slipped during one of his jumps and got his legs caught under the train. They were amputated below the knees. In most cases, that would have been the end of his career as a guard. Instead, he changed jobs, became a signalman (who used a series of flags to signal to trains that the needed to stop or slow down), and also found help so he could continue to do his job. Who was Jumper’s great assistant? A baboon named Jack.

  JACK OF ALL TRADES

  Wide constructed pegs to complete his legs and even built a small trolley to make it easier to move around. But living and working alone were tough with his disability, and he began to look for solutions. One afternoon in 1881, he found the perfect one.

  There are a couple of theories as to how Wide found his baboon friend: One says that he spotted the animal pulling an ox wagon in the town center and pleaded with the animal’s owner to give him up. The reluctant owner was finally persuaded, but he entrusted Wide with the baboon, named Jack, with one admonition: give Jack “a tot of good Cape brandy” every night, or don’t expect him to do any work the next day. Wide agreed.

  A second story says that Wide found Jack as a baby, in a cage at the local market. He bought the animal and brought him home.

  Whichever is the real story, the first thing Wide trained Jack to do was push him the half-mile from his house to the train station in his trolley. Jack took to his new job very well.

  JACK TO THE RESCUE

  Wide’s job as a signalman involved listening to the whistle blasts of the passing locomotives. The three tracks were assigned a number of whistle blasts: one blast for track one, two for track two, and three for track three. Four blasts meant the conductor of the train needed the keys for the coal sheds.

  Wide didn’t expect Jack to do this job for him, but it turned out that Jack was quite a listener. After only a few days, the baboon had figured out the codes and rushed to get the keys for a conductor who sounded his whistle four times. Wide was astounded but knew he—and Jack—were on to something.

  Wide started training the baboon to make the appropriate track changes, too. Jack’s performance was flawless, and Wide knew he had found an assistant who could take on the demands of the tough job.

  TATTLETALE

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before Wide’s unconventional assistant was noticed. A local woman saw the baboon working the railways and complained to the authorities. A team of inspectors visited the station to see what was going on, and when they learned the truth, they fired Wide on the spot.

  But Wide was never one to give up . . . and certainly not when it came to the job he loved so much. He pleaded with the inspectors to put Jack to the test. When Jack performed the tasks perfectly, the amazed men gave in and admitted he was no ordinary baboon—this was Jack the Signalman. Wide and Jack were reinstated. Jack even received an official employment number from the local government, making him a full-time employee.

  KNOWING JACK

  Jack was so good at his job that he even looked at the oncoming trains before changing the signals, a sign that he wasn’t just going through the motions. He actually understood the importance of what he was doing. But more importantly, Jack and Wide developed a true friendship. Jack’s loyalty helped him learn to do all kinds of jobs for Wide, including helping to clean the house where they lived in and acting as night watchman.

  Jack died in 1890, but he still inspires people today. The Albany Museum in Grahamstown, South Africa, has an exhibit dedicated to him. And a photographic museum recently opened at the site of now-closed Uitenhage station, where locals still marvel at the story of Jack the Signalman.

  MEMORABLE OSCAR ACCEPTANCE SPEECHES

  “I’m speechless now. I, well, I, thank you life, thank you love, and it is true, there is some angels in this city.”

  —Marion Cotillard (Best Actress for La Vie En Rose)

  “Marlon Brando very regretfully cannot accept this very generous award. And the reason for this being is the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry.”

&
nbsp; —Sacheen Littlefeather (refusing Brando’s Best Actor award for The Godfather)

  “This is one night I wish I smoked and drank.”

  —Grace Kelly (Best Actress for The Country Girl)

  “Thank you to Martin Scorsese. I hope my son will marry your daughter.”

  —Cate Blanchett (Best Supporting Actress for The Aviator)

  THE JULIA WILD CHILD AWARD

  Insect Delicacies from Around the World

  Tired of chicken cooked 100 ways? Or the tried-and-true, but

  boring, rotation of beef, poultry, seafood, and a vegetarian meal?

  We’ve got the perfect solution to make your meals take flight.

  NOBODY EATS COCKROACHES

  Gene Defoliart, professor of entomology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and publisher of The Food Insects Newsletter, told the New York Times, “Nobody eats cockroaches. They’re unsanitary. Kind of disgusting, when you think about it.” Well . . . yes. But fans of entomophagy (insect-eating) universally agree that people who don’t eat insects are missing out on an abundant, low-calorie, easily sustained protein source that has been appreciated for thousands of years.

  Ancient Greeks and Romans often ate insects—the latter particularly enjoyed beetle larvae. Today, biting into a fried cricket or spreading a spoonful of ant pâté on a cracker gives most Americans the willies, but people in other countries and cultures eat them all the time. An estimated 80 percent of the world’s population are entomophages—people who consume insects as food. (Yes, on purpose!) Dragonflies, cicadas, crickets, grasshoppers, and giant water bugs are all on a menu somewhere at any given time.

  Cultivating insects as a food source has many advantages:

  • Insects create far more edible protein per pound than chicken or beef.

  • According to National Geographic, insect farming is more efficient than cattle production: 100 pounds of feed produce 10 pounds of beef, but the same amount of feed yields 45 pounds of crickets.

  • Hamburger is roughly 18 percent protein and 18 percent fat, but cooked grasshopper contains up to 60 percent protein with just 6 percent fat. (Other insects like caterpillars, termites, and beetle grubs are high in fat, though like fish, insect fatty acids are unsaturated and healthier.)

  • Insects are faster to raise than other meat.

  • They’re also easier to hunt. (One 19th-century observer of Paiute Indians watched tribe members dig trenches and drive crickets into them.)

  BEYOND ANT FARMS

  Nutritional aspects make bugs a smart crop, and new demand is making them a cash crop. The Seattle Times reported in 2005 that when farmers near Mexico City realized that they could get as much money for trapping and selling grasshoppers as they were spending on pesticides, they began deliberately planting crops as “traps” for the protein-rich insects.

  HAVE ANOTHER APHID, MY DEAR

  Types of insects that people around the world eat include ants, beetles, caterpillars, cockroaches, crickets, grasshoppers, earthworms, fly larvae, bees, mealworms, may flies, moths, rolli-pollies, silverfish, termites, water bugs, and wasps. They all have distinctive flavors. Male giant water bugs have a minty taste; leaf-cutting ants have a walnut flavor; fire-ant pupae taste like watermelon; and many grubs taste sweet and creamy.

  These varied flavors were highlighted in a menu from a New York Entomological Society “Bug Banquet” held at the Explorers Club:

  Assorted Crudites with Peppery Delight Mealworm Dip

  Wax Worm and Mealworm California Rolls W/ Tamari Dipping Sauce

  Wild Mushrooms in Mealworm Flour Pastry

  Cricket and Vegetable Tempura

  Mealworm Balls in Tomato Sauce

  Mini Fontina Bruschetta with Mealworm Gannouj

  Wax Worm Fritters with Plum Sauce

  Seasoned Cricket Breads and Butter

  Assorted Insect Sugar Cookies.

  Most authorities (both entomologists and chefs) recommend that would-be entomophages stick to farmed insects. Not only are they disease-free—they’re more likely to be toxin-free, too.

  DOWN THE HATCH

  You’ve been reading along, and you’re probably still squirming. You’d never go near a fire-roasted tarantula, or coconut-milk-marinated grubs. On the other hand, maybe you would. Most people already eat shrimp and lobster, which are arthropods, just like insects. They stir honey, an insect-made sweetener, into their tea. And although only a few of us have eaten one, we’ve all heard of the agave worm at the bottom of a tequila bottle.

  Still not convinced that “mixed-bug” products are for you? Well, like it or not, you’ve already been consuming them. The FDA doesn’t ban insect parts in our food, because that would be—well—impossible. Insects are present in many different foodstuffs, especially grains. (Sacks of rice always include rice weevils.) One Ohio University resource on unintentional entomophagy estimates that people eat the equivalent of one to two pounds of insects a year. Regulatory agencies around the world do try to limit the acceptable quantities of insect parts in food. For example, 100 grams of chocolate can contain up to 60 insect fragments. We needn’t go on. You’re already an entomophage.

  OTHER BUGGY FOOD ITEMS

  • Shellac is a well-known wood finishing product. Applied to wood, it makes furniture shine. It’s also used to make food shiny, most commonly jelly beans and apples. But exactly what is “shellac”? It’s an excretion of the Kerria lacca beetle, found in Thailand. To stick to trees and leaves, the beetle excretes a sticky substance. Collectors scrape it right off of the trees.

  • Food labels may list any of the following: crimson lake, cochineal, natural red 4, E120, or even natural color. These are all other names for carmine . . . which is just another name for finely ground red beetle abdomen.

  THE BURIED TREASURE AWARD

  Geocaching

  Under every leaf and rock, there might be a “cache.”

  THE SEARCH IS ON!

  Most of us can’t dive for Spanish gold and sunken treasure on shipwrecks, but plenty of people comb beaches and fields with metal detectors, hoping to stumble on something valuable. But there’s an opportunity to search for treasure that you may not have known about—geocaching. Geocaching is an activity that combines new technology—a Global Positioning System (GPS)—with old-fashioned fun, and a chance to find hidden caches of trinkets and other items.

  SIGNED, SEALED, DELIVERED

  Geocaching has an oddball predecessor: the “sport” of letterboxing, which has been around for more than a century and a half. Letterboxing began on England’s lonely moors, specifically at Dartmoor’s Cranmere Pool in 1854, when a Victorian tour guide named James Perrott left a bottle there to collect people’s notes and letters.

  It took a while for Perrott’s idea to catch on—the next message didn’t appear for 40 years, and the third for another 44! But once people did catch on, they started making the letters more and more elaborate, and then began hiding the letterboxes to make searching for the container part of the fun. By the 1970s, letterboxing had morphed into a combination of orienteering, puzzle, and craft, as serious hikers looked farther, wider, and harder for hidden boxes, and filled them with elaborately designed letters, poems, maps, and drawings. At this point, letterboxers decided that their sport needed a Code of Conduct so that the natural landscape, historic sites, and landowners wouldn’t be disturbed. The job fell to an Englishman named Godfrey “God” Swinscow, who drafted the following rules, which remain in place today:

  • The letterboxes couldn’t be attached to any walls, buildings, or other ruins.

  • The boxes couldn’t be hidden in hazardous locations or anywhere that someone could get injured retrieving them.

  • The boxes couldn’t be affixed to anything, and the people setting them up weren’t allowed to use cement or other building materials to secure them.

  NO STASH IN THE CACHE

  After an article about letterboxing appeared in a 1998 issue of Smithsonian magazine, the activ
ity gained popularity in the United States and adopted new technology and a new name: geocaching. On May 2, 2000, selective availability became “open” for all GPS units, meaning that anyone could precisely pinpoint a location. Tech enthusiasts wasted no time finding interesting ways to use this technology . . . and geocaching was one of them.

  Originally called “GPS stash hunting” (the name change was suggested to avoid the negative drug-related connotation of “stash”), the game involves burying a geocache—a small (waterproof) container that holds a logbook and trinkets—for other people to find using their GPS.

  A typical hunt works like this:

  • Someone lists the location coordinates of a cache on a geocaching Web site.

  • A participant chooses that site and enters the coordinates into a GPS.

  • The participant travels to the location and starts looking. Geocaches can be underneath logs, hidden in a manmade structure, under water, or hidden by shrubs—the possibilities are endless.

  • The geocache is usually a box that contains a log book, an information sheet, and some kind of “treasure.” Treasures range from money, jewelry, tickets, maps, and antiques to CDs, pins, buttons, books, maps, tools, or figurines. The only rule of the game is that the finder must sign the book, but most geocache enthusiasts also try to “up” the find by leaving something nicer than what was there.

  • Common sense should prevail for deciding what treasures to leave, though. Don’t leave food because animals may destroy the cache, and use common sense and don’t leave explosives, alcohol, and weapons because geocaching is an all-ages sport.