Uncle John's Actual and Factual Bathroom Reader Read online

  BLOCKBUSTER

  Blockbuster boasts one of the most spectacular rises—and falls—in the history of American business. They were the first large video-rental chain, with more than 9,000 stores from coast to coast at its peak in 2004. In the 1980s, before VCR owners could “make it a Blockbuster night,” the vast majority of video rental stores were small mom-and-pop operations. But they couldn’t keep up with the local Blockbuster, which offered a huge selection and was much more likely to have the big hit movies and new releases in stock on a Saturday night. Another feature of Blockbuster: exorbitant late fees, which customers hated, but what choice did they have? None…until cheaper, more convenient, video-rental-by-mail services like Netflix arrived in the late 1990s and $1-a-day rental kiosks like Redbox started popping up in the early 2000s. Vanquished, Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy protection in 2010, and Dish Network bought around 1,700 of its locations before closing them down over the next few years. Today, only nine independently owned and operated stores bearing the Blockbuster name still operate. They’re mostly in rural areas of Oregon, Alaska, and Texas, where internet service isn’t good enough for video streaming.

  Studies show: Silver cars are the least likely to be involved in a serious accident.

  JAMES THE [BLEEP!]

  Let’s face it: Not every Alexander gets to be remembered as “the Great.” Here’s a look at some little-known historical figures who weren’t as lucky as Alexander was when the nicknames were being handed out. More rulers with odd nicknames are on page 382.

  ARNULF the UNLUCKY (c. 1055–1071)

  Arnulf was 15 years old when his uncle, Robert the Frisian, killed Arnulf’s father, Count Baldwin VI of Flanders, in a dispute over the titles and territories that each inherited from their father. On Baldwin’s death, Arnulf became Count of Flanders, with his mother Richilde ruling in his name as regent until he came of age. But Uncle Robert wanted his nephew’s countdom for himself. So in February 1071, Robert’s forces met Richilde’s at the battle of Ravenshoven, near Kassel in modern-day Germany. Richilde was defeated; Arnulf, then 16, was killed.

  JUSTINIAN the SLIT-NOSED (c. 668–711)

  When his father, the Byzantine emperor Constantine IV, died in 685, 16-year-old Justinian II succeeded him. During his reign, he alienated his subjects with religious persecution, high taxes that funded his extravagant lifestyle, and land policies that threatened the aristocracy. In 695 his subjects deposed him. To ensure that he could never reclaim the throne, they cut off his nose. Byzantine emperors receive their authority from God, who was perfect, the thinking went. Any facial disfigurement that rendered them less than perfect disqualified them from the job. At least that was how it was supposed to work. But Justinian replaced his nose with a gold prosthesis and in 705 he raised an army in Bulgaria, marched on Constantinople, and reclaimed the throne for himself…and that proved to be his undoing. He was so brutal in exacting revenge against his enemies that in 711 he was toppled again, this time for good. Both Justinian and his six-year-old son (and co-emperor), Tiberius, were executed.

  MICHAEL MINUS-A-QUARTER (c. 1050–1090)

  Michael VII Doukas, another teenage Byzantine emperor, inherited the throne in 1067 at the age of 17. Like a lot of people his age, he preferred to shirk his adult responsibilities, leaving the actual running of the empire to his mother and uncle for several years. Even when he assumed full control, he relied heavily on ministers, who instituted disastrous policies such as high taxes, profligate spending, and neglect of the army, whose subsequent mutinies cost the empire great swaths of territory in Italy and Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey). During one such military revolt in March 1078, Michael decided to abdicate rather than fight to keep his throne, and took vows to become a monk. By that time his disastrous policies had caused the Byzantine currency to lose so much value (about a quarter of its value, one would assume) that he became known as Michael Parapinakes—“minus a quarter.”

  If you shove a red sea sponge through a sieve to break it up into pieces, the pieces will re-form into a new sea sponge.

  HENRY the IMPOTENT (1425–1474)

  If you thought Henry IV of Castile, in north-central Spain, gets his unfortunate nickname because he was a weak and ineffective leader, think again. He was a weak and ineffective leader, but he really may have been impotent. His first marriage, to his cousin the infanta, or princess, Blanche, when he was 15, was annulled 13 years later on the grounds that Henry was unable to consummate the marriage. He blamed his problem on a curse.

  The annulment freed Henry to marry another of his cousins, Joana of Portugal, the sister of the Portuguese king, in 1455. That marriage produced a daughter, Juana, in 1462…or did it? Rumors circulated that Juana’s real father was Joana’s lover, the Duke of Albuquerque. The story became more credible when Joana had two more children with another lover, the nephew of a bishop. Henry eventually divorced his wife, and bowed to pressure to disinherit Juana in favor of his half-sister, Isabella. She became the queen of Castile when Henry died in 1474. Does the name sound familiar? She’s the same Isabella who married Ferdinand II of Aragon, united Castile and Aragon in 1479 to form the kingdom of Spain, and financed Christopher Columbus’s voyages to the New World. (She also established the Spanish Inquisition…but that’s another story.)

  JAMES the S**T (1633-1701)

  James II was the last Catholic monarch of England, Scotland, and Ireland. He was deposed in 1688 when his Protestant nephew and son-in-law, William of Orange, ruler of the Netherlands, invaded England in what has become known as the Glorious Revolution (because there was very little bloodshed). Afterward, James fled to France, but in 1689 he returned to Ireland in an attempt to regain the throne. In July 1690, James met William, now King William III, at the Battle of the Boyne, 30 miles from Dublin. When James’s forces were defeated, he fled back to France, deserting his Irish allies and leaving them to fight on without him until their final defeat in 1691. His abandonment of the Irish earned him the nickname Séamus an Chaca—“James the S**t.”

  In Finland, Cinderella is sometimes called Tuna, which is a diminutive form of Christina.

  APOLLO INSURANCE COVERS

  Q: How hard is it for an astronaut to get life insurance? A: It’s not rocket science! (Note: That joke worked better after a couple of beers.) Now, a cool story about the creative life insurance programs created for our early astronauts.

  SPACEMEN

  In the summer of 1969, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin were preparing for one of the most historic journeys ever: the Apollo 11 mission to land on the Moon. All three astronauts knew what they were getting into. There was a good chance they wouldn’t be returning. Just two years earlier, astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee died on the Apollo 1 rocket, and they never even made it off the ground. They were killed when a fire broke out in the rocket’s cabin during a rehearsal launch at Cape Kennedy.

  All three Apollo 11 astronauts were married and had children, and they were naturally worried about the fate of their families if the same kind of tragedy were to befall them. Taking out life insurance policies would have been the normal way of addressing such a problem, but when you’re about to fly a rocket into space, insurance companies might be (understandably) reluctant to offer you a policy, and even if they did, the premium would probably be higher than the astronauts could afford. So someone came up with a creative way of tackling the problem: they created a bunch of memorabilia called “covers.”

  GOT YOU COVERED

  “Covers” is a term used by stamp collectors, and they’re simply envelopes, usually with addresses, commemorative images, and canceled stamps on them. (If you’ve never sent a letter, “canceled” means they’ve been marked as “used” by the post office.) In this case the envelopes had space-related images on them—NASA badges, rockets, etc.—and each one was signed by all of the astronauts during their preflight quarantine period before the launch. After all the covers were signed, stamps were affixed to them (they
were special-issue NASA stamps), and the covers were stored until the most important days of the Apollo 11 mission—the day of the launch (July 16, 1969), and the day they touched down on the Moon (July 20), and so on—at which time they were taken to post offices, where the stamps were canceled with those dates.

  After being canceled, the envelopes were delivered to the astronauts’ families for safekeeping. These were those families’ life insurance policies; if Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin did not return from their mission, the historic autographed covers would in all likelihood be worth significant amounts of money. And because the men had signed so many of them, they could be held for years, or even decades, and sold only when needed.

  What’s so special about -40° Fahrenheit? It’s the only temperature that reads the same on a Celsius thermometer: -40° Celsius.

  TOUCHDOWN

  The Apollo 11 mission was, of course, a success, with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin becoming the first humans to walk on the Moon. The trio of astronauts returned home safely and, thankfully, the insurance covers did not need to be used. They did, however, become collectors’ items, and you can still find them for sale today. (One fetched almost $60,000 at an auction in 2017.) Here are some more fun facts about the Apollo insurance covers:

  •The Apollo insurance cover scheme was repeated for the next several missions. It was discontinued after the Apollo 16 mission in 1972.

  •Years after the Apollo missions, it was discovered that while the astronauts truly could not afford life insurance on their fairly meager NASA salaries, they did in fact have life insurance policies: NASA couldn’t purchase policies for them, but big businesses, such as oil companies and banks, did contribute funds that went toward the purchase of polices for astronauts on all of the Apollo missions.

  •Want an Apollo insurance cover of your own? Look on eBay—they show up there on a regular basis.

  DID YOU KNOW?

  Buzz Aldrin’s real name…is Buzz Aldrin.

  He had it legally changed (from Edwin) in the 1980s.

  20 FICTIONAL CHARACTERS WITH STARS ON THE HOLLYWOOD WALK OF FAME

  1.Snoopy

  2.Lassie

  3.Rin Tin Tin

  4.Big Bird

  5.Donald Duck

  6.Woody Woodpecker

  7.Bugs Bunny

  8.Mickey Mouse

  9.Minnie Mouse

  10.Winnie the Pooh

  11.Kermit the Frog

  12.The Muppets

  13.Rugrats

  14.Shrek

  15.Godzilla

  16.Strongheart

  17.The Munchkins (from Oz)

  18.Tinker Bell

  19.Snow White

  20.The Simpsons

  “Raise” and “raze” are homonyms (they sound the same) and antonyms (they have opposite meanings).

  THE MINECRAFT STORY

  Do you play the video game Minecraft? If you don’t, your kids or somebody close to you probably does. Not since Pac-Man has a single video game been this popular. Here’s a look into the origins and impact of this cultural behemoth.

  PRESS ANY KEY TO START

  •Markus Persson was born in Sweden in 1979. As a child, he exhibited a natural talent with computers, and he was fortunate to grow up in a time when they were starting to become both accessible and affordable. Using a computer language called BASIC and his family’s Commodore 128, he started learning computer coding at the age of seven…and was making games to play with his friends by age eight.

  •He stuck with it as he grew up, and when it came time to start planning for life post-graduation, Markus told his high school guidance counselor that he wanted to design video games for a living. The counselor told Markus that his dream was just that—a dream, and it was never going to happen.

  •Undaunted, Markus kept making small, simple games for himself, while he worked as a programmer for various companies in Sweden, including King, a software developer that made web-based games, and Jalbum, which makes digital photo sharing software.

  READY PLAYER ONE

  •But Persson soon grew bored with his programming job, and started to spend all of his free time building his most complex game to date. He decided to call it Cave Game, and it would be a game of simple graphics (resembling Nintendo games from the 1980s) that centered on a player going on a mystical quest, exploring caves, and fighting off mythical beasts.

  •But then he changed his mind. He decided to lose the plot and have the game be an open world full of endless possibilities with no clear objective. And he changed the name to Minecraft.

  •The “mine” part: players could dig in the ground (and seas, and underground, and other “biomes”) to look for wood, iron, gold, emeralds, and other materials. With those, they could build simple structures or fantastic towers…they just had to look out for the skeletons, zombies, and other bad guys hanging around. The worst villain of all: the Creeper, a green monster that would approach players’ hard-built structures…and blow them up.

  The Golden Gate Bridge is the most photographed bridge in the world.

  GAME ON

  •In 2009 Persson (who started going by the name “Notch,” a nickname he used in online video game forums) released the original, not-quite-polished “alpha” version of Minecraft online. Length of time it took him to design it: six days.

  •While a lot of video games receive a huge, multimedia push, this wasn’t that kind of game. The only reason anyone knew it existed was because Notch wrote on the video game forum TIGSource that he’d released a game called Minecraft on his website (Minecraft.net—it’s still live). “It’s an alpha version,” he added, “so it might crash sometimes.”

  •Notch’s plan: Sell the game to a small video game company for enough money so that he could quit his job and then design another game. Then he’d sell that one, and repeat the process. That’s not exactly what happened.

  EXTRA LIVES

  •Most of the most popular video games in history—Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros., The Sims—were developed by huge software companies, and designed, programmed, and marketed by armies of employees. Remarkably, Minecraft was a one-man operation. Notch designed, programmed, and released the game literally by himself. That also meant he got every last penny from its sale.

  •From that single post on TIGSource, the popularity of Minecraft grew—its appeal was in its simplicity and open-ended format. By the summer of 2010, tens of thousands of people around the world had downloaded Minecraft. The way they paid for the game was as humble as the game itself: they sent Notch a few bucks via PayPal.

  •When Notch’s personal PayPal account reached over $760,000, the service locked his account—they thought he was doing something suspicious, maybe even illegal.

  •Having made almost a million dollars, Notch decided to quit his job at Jalbum to devote himself to Minecraft full-time. He resigned on his 31st birthday.

  LEVEL UP

  •Part of devoting himself to Minecraft meant expanding the operation to keep up with demand. To continue adding elements to the game and issuing updates to its growing army of players (something that was impossible for the manufactured disc or cartridge segment of home video games), Notch had to delegate the business side of things to other people. He formed a company called Mojang (the Swedish version of “whatchamacallit”) and hired six people to help with programming and processing payments.

  •As Minecraft grew, so did attention from beyond just the people who were playing it. And a lot of people were playing it—by the end of 2010, it had sold 500,000 copies, and “Minecraft” was YouTube’s top search of 2014, and Google’s #2 search.

  •Notch started getting offers. The video game publisher Valve wanted to buy Minecraft or hire Notch and other Mojang staffers, but Notch resisted. Nevertheless, in 2011 he announced that he’d be leaving the company and his game. Reason: He’d created and shared his game, and said he was ready to move on to something else.

  •A few months after Notch announced his departu
re, Microsoft bought Mojang and Minecraft. Price tag: $2.5 billion. Bill Gates’s software giant beat offers from video game companies like Valve, Electronic Arts, and Activision, as well as a $1 billion offer from an anonymous tech giant, rumored to be Google.

  The first draft of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” is six pages long.

  MINECRAFT BY THE NUMBERS

  •Despite being less than a decade old, Minecraft is already the second-best-selling video game of all time. More than 120 million copies have been sold worldwide. (It trails only Tetris.)

  •Minecraft is the most-played online game. Fifty-five million people hop on the internet to play it each month. That’s quadruple the number of people that play the second-most-popular online game, World of Warcraft.

  •Markus Persson now lives in the United States full-time, in an expensive estate in Beverly Hills. How expensive? He paid $70 million for it—making it the priciest home in the pricey L.A. suburb. (He outbid Jay-Z and Beyoncé for it.)

  •Minecraft remains the best-selling independently produced game of all time. That means it wasn’t published by a huge video game company, the way nearly every other video game is.

  •Minecraft is also the fourth-most-lucrative thing to ever come out of Sweden, trailing only Volvo, IKEA, and the band ABBA.

  •Did Microsoft get its money’s worth? In the year before the corporate giant bought the rights to Minecraft, the game generated $81 million. In the year after the Microsoft purchase, it made $237.7 million.

  Human perspiration is odorless—at least at first. The pungent smell comes from bacteria that invade it after it exits your body.