Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader Read online

  People soon asked him to run the cable to their houses—and it was obviously in his best interest to do so: If they could get channels, they would buy TVs. So he designed a new signal amplifier and began making improvements to the system. (One early problem: Walson’s customers lost their signal whenever it rained. He solved that by upgrading his original army surplus cable.)

  THE FUTURE OF TV

  Walson soon had hundreds of customers in Mahanoy City and the surrounding communities. His original subscription rate: $2.00 a month (plus a onetime $100 installation fee). Over the years, he continued to build his business, expanding into other towns and improving his antenna technology to capture more stations. His company, Service Electric Cable, is still in business and is now run by his children. Among their claims to fame: In 1972 they were the first cable system in the United States to carry HBO.

  Beavers mate for life.

  OTHER CABLE PIONEERS

  • Ed Parsons: A radio technician who sold and serviced ship-to-shore systems in the port town of Astoria, Oregon, Parsons began building his CATV system when his wife announced that she wanted to be able to watch television. He managed to tune in a Seattle station on Thanksgiving Day 1948 by placing an antenna on the roof of the tallest hotel in downtown Astoria. By 1950 he had over 100 customers. Rate: $3.00 a month with a $125 installation fee.

  • Robert Tarlton: Pennsylvania was the early center of CATV. Not far from where John Walson built his system in Mahanoy City, Tarlton organized several appliance dealers into an investment group to form the Panther Valley Television Company in 1950. Two years later, Tarlton was among the group of CATV operators that formed the National Community Television Council in nearby Pottsville.

  • John Campbell: A movie theater projectionist who learned electronics in the U.S. Navy, Campbell brought CATV to Texas after reading an article on the Pennsylvania systems in 1951. Since he didn’t have enough money to travel to Pennsylvania and study the existing CATV facilities, he simply designed and built his own from scratch. He charged a $95 installation fee and $3.00 a month for service. The installation fee became his seed money: “We would wire up one block, hook up five people, get the $95 each, and go buy some more cable.”

  • Bill Daniels: To bring CATV to Casper, Wyoming, Daniels had to become the first cable operator in the United States to use microwave transmitters. His system went on the air in 1953 and carried four Denver stations across 230 miles of mountain ranges. The added technological difficulties translated to higher costs: $7.50 a month. It also meant less expansive service. Even though the system brought in four stations, it could transmit only one at a time. So how did Daniels decide what to show? He mailed ballots to his customers every month so they could vote on which channels they wanted to watch at what times.

  The Monopoly character locked behind bars: Jake the Jailbird. (Policeman: Officer Edgar Mallory.)

  HOLLYWOOD SPEAK

  The entertainment industry trade journal Variety has a “slanguage” all its own. To assist the “aud,” here’s a glossary to help make sense of words like…“aud.”

  CRIX. The collective term for critics

  MELLER. Melodrama

  CLICK. A movie that does good B.O. (box office)

  SPROCKET OPERA. Film festival

  BLURB. TV commercial

  PERF. Acting performance

  TUBTHUMP. Promote heavily

  AYEM. Morning

  ANKLE. To quit or be dismissed from a job, without necessarily specifying which

  MOUSE. The Walt Disney Co. (also called Mouse House)

  LENSE. To shoot a movie

  AUD. Audience

  PERCENTER. An agent

  BIRD. Satellite

  KUDOCAST. Awards show

  DISKERY. A record company

  ZITCOM. A sitcom aimed at teens

  FEEVEE. Pay TV

  DUCATS. Movie or concert tickets

  HOOFER. Dancer (also called a terper)

  KIDVID. Children’s TV show

  SOCKO. Very good, as in “socko B.O.”

  OFF-NET. Network TV series reruns sold into syndication

  N.S.G. Not So Good, usually bad reviews or poor B.O.

  NABE. Neighborhood theater

  NET. TV network—the Eye (CBS), the Peacock (NBC), or the Alphabet (ABC)

  AD-PUB. The advertising and publicity department of a movie studio

  CLEFFER. Songwriter

  PREEM. A movie premiere

  SCRIBBLER. TV writer. (A screenwriter is a scripter.)

  MITTING. When the aud applauds

  Slow hand: How fast does the hour hand travel on a wristwatch? .00000275 mph.

  REGIONAL TREATS

  You’ve probably had a Philadelphia cheesesteak or a Chicago deep-dish pizza. You might even have had them in Chicago or Philadelphia. Here are some local delicacies rarely found outside their home territory.

  FOOD: Garbage Plate

  FOUND IN: Rochester, New York

  DESCRIPTION: Diner owner Nick Tahou (of Nick Tahou Hots) invented this dish in the late 1940s when some college students asked him for a plate with “all the garbage on it.” The Plate starts with home fries and macaroni salad mixed together. It’s then topped with two hamburger patties, onions, mustard, ketchup, and hot sauce. You can replace the hamburger patties with cheeseburgers, a steak, hot dogs, Italian sausages, link sausages, ham, or fried fish. The entrée is served at other Rochester restaurants, but since Tahou trademarked “Garbage Plate,” it’s usually listed on rival menus as the “Dumpster Plate.”

  FOOD: St. Paul Sandwich

  FOUND IN: Chinese restaurants in St. Louis, Missouri

  DESCRIPTION: It’s a sandwich that consists of an egg foo yung patty on white bread with lettuce, tomato, bean sprouts, onions, dill pickle, and lots of mayonnaise. The origins of the sandwich—and its name—are unknown.

  FOOD: Runza

  FOUND IN: Nebraska and Kansas

  DESCRIPTION: German and Russian immigrants settled there in the late 1800s and developed this dish—a stuffed bread pocket, filled with minced beef, pork, sauerkraut, and onions. If you get one in Nebraska, it will be rectangular. A Kansas runza is usually round.

  He who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it. —Chinese proverb

  FOOD: Scrapple

  FOUND IN: Philadelphia and Delaware

  DESCRIPTION: Created by German butchers, scrapple is believed to be the first pork dish that originated in the United States. The main ingredient is pork bits left over from butchering, including the head, liver, and heart. The meat is boiled off the bone, chopped, and added with spices to a cornmeal mush. It’s gelled into loaves, cut into slices, and pan-fried. It’s served as a breakfast food, topped with maple syrup.

  FOOD: Slinger

  FOUND IN: St. Louis, Missouri

  DESCRIPTION: A mountain of food similar to the Garbage Plate. The Slinger consists of two eggs topped with hash browns and a hamburger patty. The whole thing is then covered in chili, topped with cheese and onions, and served with bacon or sausage. (Ugh!)

  FOOD: Horseshoe Sandwich

  FOUND IN: Springfield, Illinois

  DESCRIPTION: It’s an open-faced sandwich of thick sourdough toast topped with ham, french fries, and a cheese sauce. It was invented at the Leland Hotel in 1928 by cooks Joe Schweska and Steve Tomko. Local legend says it was created to honor local horseshoe makers who frequently dined at the Leland. It was originally served on a hot metal platter (to represent an anvil); the ham looked like a horseshoe, and the fries resembled nails.

  FOOD: Hot Brown

  FOUND IN: Louisville, Kentucky

  DESCRIPTION: It’s named after the place where it was created in 1926: the Brown Hotel. The most popular dish on the menu was ham and eggs, but chef Fred Schmidt became bored with making it. So he came up with this sandwich as an alternative: an open-faced sandwich of turkey, bacon, and Mornay sauce (a basic cheese sauce), cooked under a broiler. It quickly gained popularity
because sliced turkey was a novelty at the time—it was rare to see turkey when it wasn’t Thanksgiving. Result: within a year, the Hot Brown was being ordered by 95 percent of Brown Hotel customers.

  Your chances of dying by drowning are about 1 in 900.

  NETWORDS

  Hey! There’s a new invention out there called the “Internet.”

  “The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand. It’s the largest experiment in anarchy that we’ve ever had.”

  —Eric Schmidt

  “Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.”

  —Mitchell Kapor

  “The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom.”

  —Jon Stewart

  “There’s a statistical theory that if you gave a million monkeys typewriters and set them to work, they’d eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know this isn’t true.”

  —Ian Hart

  “I’ve just found out there are pages on the Internet dedicated to whether I’m gay or not.”

  —Matthew Perry

  “National borders aren’t even speed bumps on the information superhighway.”

  —Tim May

  “The Internet is the most powerful stupidity amplifier ever invented. It’s like TV without the TV part.”

  —James “Kibo” Parry

  “First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII—and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we’ve realized it’s a brochure.”

  —Douglas Adams

  “My favorite thing is that you get to go into the private world of real creeps without having to smell them.”

  —Penn Jillette

  “Sometimes I think the Web is a big plot to keep people like me away from normal society.”

  —Scott Adams

  “Looking at the proliferation of personal Web pages on the Net, it looks like very soon everyone on Earth will have 15 megabytes of fame.”

  —M. G. Sriram

  Although 85% of dieters do lose weight, only 15% keep it off for longer than two years.

  MYTH-CONCEPTIONS

  “Common knowledge” is frequently wrong. Here are some examples.

  MYTH: Cockroaches would survive a nuclear holocaust.

  TRUTH: Some scientists say that cockroach bodies contain very little water, which might protect them from radiation damage (although their offspring would be genetically mutated). But on an episode of MythBusters, 50 cockroaches were exposed to post-nuclear levels of radiation…and they all died within 24 hours.

  MYTH: If you think someone is an undercover cop, ask them. If they are, they have to tell you.

  TRUTH: It’s a common scene in movies: The criminal asks a suspicious character if he’s a cop and avoids entrapment. No such law exists. Undercover cops are allowed to lie to protect themselves.

  MYTH: Whatever else was said about Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy, at least he made the trains run on time.

  TRUTH: Pure propaganda. Italy’s railway system was upgraded between World War I and when Mussolini took office in 1922, so whatever improvements had been made weren’t his doing. Even so, the claim that the trains in Italy were always on time was an exaggeration.

  MYTH: Singer-songwriter Robert Zimmerman changed his name to Bob Dylan in order to honor one of his idols, Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.

  TRUTH: The name is an homage, but not to Thomas. Dylan had a favorite uncle named Dillon and was also a big fan of the TV western Gunsmoke, which featured a character—a U.S. Marshal—named Matt Dillon.

  MYTH: When you’re hungry, your stomach rumbles.

  TRUTH: It’s not your stomach making the noise—it’s actually your small intestine. The small intestine is what’s behind your belly button; most of your stomach sits behind the lower ribs.

  Sterling silver contains 7.5% copper.

  MAN’S BEST FRIEND

  …or worst nightmare?

  BOUNCY DOG. A family in York, England, reported their bull terrier Harvey missing. At first, they had no idea how he’d escaped—there were no signs of him digging his way under the fence or finding a hole in it. They finally figured out that Harvey had bounced onto the trampoline in the backyard, over the backyard fence, into the neighbor’s yard, and away.

  STICKY DOG. One day, Pamela Panting was playing fetch with Hector, her Great Dane puppy. The game ended when Hector lost sight of the two-foot-long tree branch Panting had thrown. The next morning, Hector wouldn’t eat and was drooling excessively, so Panting took him to a veterinarian. An X-ray revealed the problem: Hector hadn’t lost the two-foot-long stick, he’d swallowed it. Cost to remove the branch: $4,000.

  CRIME DOG. In Waukesha, Wisconsin, a drug-sniffing German Shepherd police dog named Officer Nutz broke out of his kennel, ran to a nearby supermarket, went through the automatic doors, grabbed a package of prime rib, and ran back outside, where he attacked the raw meat. Officer Nutz was captured on store security cameras; the police department placed him on administrative leave.

  EMBARRASSING DOG. The Milner family of Dorset, England, was playing around with Google Earth, an Internet service that displays satellite photos of nearly any location on the planet. They looked up their home and saw a mysterious brown blob on their front lawn. The Milners finally came to realize what that brown lump was: Boris, their bull mastiff. At 200 pounds, the dog was so overweight that he could be seen from outer space.

  TRAITOR DOGS. Police in Marion Oaks, Florida, went to the home of Wayne Huff to arrest him on wire fraud charges. Huff came to the door with his two dogs and resisted arrest, so the police used force. The struggle continued as the cops dragged Huff into his front yard. Both of Huff’s dogs then attacked him, biting him on his arm, back, leg, and ear. The bites subdued him enough to be peaceably taken away by the police.

  Americans use enough toilet paper each year to stretch to the Sun and back.

  FOUNDING FATHERS

  You know the names. Here’s a look at the people behind them.

  CHARLES WALGREEN

  In 1896, 23-year-old Walgreen lost a finger in an accident at the Galesburg, Illinois, shoe factory where he worked. Suddenly unemployed and disabled, Walgreen took the advice of his doctor, who suggested he become a pharmacist. Walgreen got his license and in 1901 moved to Chicago to work for a pharmacist named Issac Blood. Upon Blood’s retirement, Walgreen bought Blood’s store and changed its name to Walgreen’s. He began to acquire other stores and eventually built one of the country’s first pharmacy chains. Among Walgreen’s other innovations were adding lunch counters, soda fountains, and grocery and household items to his pharmacies. By 1927 there were 110 Walgreen’s stores. Today, there are more than 6,000.

  HENRY MARTYN ROBERT

  In 1863 Robert, an army major, was asked to preside over an organizational meeting at his church in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Because the attendees were from different parts of the country, and all were familiar with different rules for how to conduct a meeting, Robert came up with his own rules: a call to order, roll call, reading of last meeting’s minutes, officers’ reports, committee reports, important new business, unfinished business, announcements, and adjournment. He thought the idea would have universal appeal, but nobody would publish Robert’s Rules of Order. So in 1876, he paid for the first printing himself. It sold out in four months. Since then, the book has sold more than 4.5 million copies, and Robert’s system is the universal standard for how meetings are conducted.

  The Speaker of the U.K. House of Commons is supposed to show extreme reluctance on taking office.

  LANE BRYANT

  In 1895, 18-year-old Lithuanian orphan Lena Himmelstein moved to New York and found work in a sweatshop for a dollar a week. In 1899 she married a man named David Bryant. When he died five years later
Lena Bryant borrowed $300 from her brother-inlaw and opened a dressmaking business. The bank misspelled “Lena” as “Lane,” but she liked the way it sounded so she called her business Lane Bryant and opened a store in Manhattan (she lived in the back). Bryant found a niche when, at the request of a pregnant customer, she made a dress fitted with an elastic waistband and an accordion skirt. Maternity wear was her specialty until 1914, when she discovered another ignored demographic: plus-size women. Sold via catalog (to “respect privacy”), Lane Bryant had annual sales of $5 million by 1923. When Bryant died in 1951, it was a $200 million company.

  JENNY CRAIG

  Craig worked for a series of fitness clubs, ultimately becoming an executive at Body Contour, a chain in the South. In 1982 she presented a weight-loss program based on nutrition, one-on-one counseling, and individualized menu plans to her bosses at Body Contour. They turned her down, so she started her own company. Because of a non-compete clause in her contract, Craig opened her first 12 Jenny Craig Weight Loss Centers in Australia. By 1985 the noncompete clause had expired, so Craig expanded to the U.S., opening 12 centers in Los Angeles. There was competition (Nutri-System, Weight Watchers), but Craig’s centers offered something others didn’t: frozen diet meals sold on the premises. Five years later, the company was national with annual revenues of $350 million. Craig sold the company in 2002; today it’s owned by Nestle.

  WILBERT GORE

  In 1944, 32-year-old chemical engineer Wilbert Gore got a job with DuPont Labs. In 1957 clients from the fledgling computer industry asked DuPont to develop cables insulated with a water-resistant and heat-maintaining substance called polytetrafluororoethylene (PTFE), better known as Teflon. DuPont declined, so Gore quit his job and started W.L. Gore & Associates in the basement of his house to make the cable. Gore landed many lucrative cable-making contracts, including one with NASA, but he developed more than 2,000 other products out of PFTE as well, including artificial blood vessels and a windproof fabric he called Gore-Tex. The first Gore-Tex product: a tent in 1976. It’s now used for shirts, jackets, pants, and other outdoor gear. An outdoorsman himself, Gore died at the age of 74 in 1986 while backpacking in Wyoming.