Uncle John’s Briefs Read online

  LEBOWSKI 7:16

  Lots of movies have inspired their own fan conventions. Let’s see, there’s Star Trek and Star Wars and…The Big Lebowski?

  BIG FLOPSKI

  When The Big Lebowski hit theaters in 1998, it didn’t make much of a splash. Though it met with critical acclaim and was well received by loyal fans of Joel and Ethan Coen, the film’s director, producer, and co-writers, it barely broke even at the box office. Following on the heels of Fargo, the Coens’ most successful film to that point, Lebowski’s modest earnings came as a disappointment. But then in 1999 it was released on video and became a cult classic.

  As Lebowski fans will tell you, this is a movie that gets better with repeat viewings. There are so many threads woven into the complicated plot, and so much dry humor and memorable dialogue, that the film simply can’t be taken in at a single glance. The Big Lebowski is one of those movies where you catch something new every time you watch it.

  Here’s the basic plot: In a case of mistaken identity, Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski—a lazy, unemployed, hippie bowler—is assaulted by thugs who are actually looking for a paraplegic millionaire named Jeffrey Lebowski, whose trophy wife “owes money all over town.” During the course of the assault, the assailants pee on The Dude’s living room carpet. Deciding to seek restitution from the real Lebowski (because “the carpet really tied the room together, man”), The Dude and his two bowling buddies, Walter and Donny, are drawn into a web of intrigue involving kidnapping, pornographers, and nihilists; Lebowski’s avant-garde daughter, Maude; a high-school student whose father used to write for the TV western, Branded; and intricately choreographed bowling-dream sequences. There’s a lot more, but you’ll have to watch the movie a few times to figure it all out…which is exactly what thousands of devoted fans have been doing for nearly a decade.

  WHY NOT?

  Three years after the movie’s release on video, two Lebowski fans, Will Russell and Scott Shuffitt, were killing time while manning a T-shirt booth at a tattoo convention in Louisville, Kentucky. Business was so slow that the two friends began entertaining themselves by quoting lines from Lebowski. The people at the next booth turned out to be fans as well, and soon joined in. Eventually, Russell and Shuffitt’s booth became the most popular spot in the convention hall, with bored vendors congregating to repeat their favorite bits of dialogue from the film. At some point, according to Russell, “Scott and I were like, man, if they can have this goofy tattoo convention, we should have a Big Lebowski convention.”

  The largest ant colony in the world is in Southern Europe—it stretches for over 3,700 miles.

  BOWLING AND WHAT-HAVE-YOU

  Because bowling is a central theme in the movie, they decided the event should be held in a bowling alley. Unfortunately, the only alley in Louisville that they could afford was a Baptist-run establishment that prohibited both drinking and bad language—a problem because it’s hard to quote lines from the film without cursing, and because The Dude is rarely seen without a White Russian in hand (at one point he can’t find any half-and-half, so he mixes his White Russian using powdered nondairy creamer). Nevertheless, the alley was rented and, with a $42 advertising budget, the “First Annual Big Lebowski What-Have-You Fest” was scheduled for October 2002. They expected a handful of their friends to show up and were surprised when 150 people—dressed up as their favorite characters from the movie—arrived for a night of bowling and a screening of the film.

  Russell and Shuffitt immediately began making plans for the second festival. Word got around on the Internet, and it proved to be almost too successful: 1,300 devotees showed up to a venue that could only hold 800. The following year 4,000 fans came…and the event’s organizers have never looked back—they’ve added festivals in Las Vegas, New York, Los Angeles, Austin, Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Portland, Boston, and London.

  THE DUDE ABIDES

  The event has taken on a life of its own. A few years ago, strange signs began appearing in the crowds at concerts and sporting events. Back in 2003 they read, “Lebowski 7:19.” The next year: “Lebowski 6:19.” These are not references to some book of cinematic scripture, they are the dates of the next annual Lebowskifest in Louisville. Keep your eyes peeled—in 2010 they read “Lebowski 7:16.”

  That spot on your back that you can’t scratch is called the acnestis.

  RANDOM ORIGINS

  Once again, the BRI asks—and answers—the question: Where does all this stuff come from?

  WATERBEDS

  The waterbed has actually been developed—unsuccessfully—numerous times. The first was more than 3,000 years ago, when Persians filled goat skins with water, sealed them with tar, and left them out in the sun to warm the water. The next time was in 1832, when Scottish doctor Neil Arnott filled a rubber-coated, mattress-sized piece of canvas with water, hoping to prevent bedsores. It wasn’t a big seller (even in hospitals), nor was it when English doctor James Paget copied the design in 1873. The main reasons: The beds leaked, and they were cold. But in 1926, scientists at B.F. Goodrich came up with a synthetic material that could make waterbeds both leakproof and warm: vinyl. Sold via mail order, they were, once again, a commercial disappointment. Then in 1968, a San Francisco State University student named Charles Hall was trying to create an ultra-soft piece of furniture. After rejecting a gigantic vinyl bag filled with Jell-O, he tried filling it with water. Hall called his creation the Pleasure Pit and patented it. Waterbeds finally caught on, at least with Bay Area hippies. They became a national fad in the early 1980s.

  THE KAZOO

  Similar instruments, called mirlitons, had been used in Africa for hundreds of years, either to imitate the sounds of animals when hunting or in religious rituals. The sound comes from the user humming (not blowing air) across a membrane, which causes it to vibrate. An African-American named Alabama Vest based the modern kazoo on these instruments. He invented his in Macon, Georgia, in the 1840s. They were mass-produced to Vest’s specifications by German clockmaker Thaddeus von Clegg and were first demonstrated at the 1852 Georgia State Fair.

  First cloned dog to survive: Snuppy, an Afghan hound, who was born in April 2005.

  HEIMLICH MANEUVER

  Throat surgeon Dr. Henry Heimlich had long noticed the high number of deaths that resulted from simple choking incidents. In the early 1970s, the common method used to relieve choking was a slap on the back. Though it sometimes worked, it often forced food farther into the windpipe, making the choker’s situation worse. Heimlich had a theory: a sudden burst of air pressure up through the esophagus would expel an obstruction. He tested it on dogs and found that it worked. Heimlich’s “maneuver” forced any food caught in the throat up, rather than down, the way a back slap sometimes did. The technique: the person applying the maneuver stands behind the victim with interlocked fingers held below the rib cage and above the navel, and pulls upward. Heimlich published his findings in 1974. Within a week, the Heimlich maneuver was used to save a person from choking. It has saved tens of thousands since.

  TARTAR SAUCE

  Before there was tartar sauce, there was steak tartare, a French dish that consists of chopped and seasoned raw beef topped with onions and capers. Whoever invented it (that person is lost to history) named it after the Tatars, a nomadic Turkic group who lived in Russia in the medieval era and, according to legend, were known for eating raw meat. Sauce de tartare was created in France the 18th century to accompany the entree. It consisted of mayonnaise, pickles, capers, onions, and tarragon. The thick, goopy sauce made its way to England in the late 19th century, where tartare was anglicized to tartar and was served alongside a distinctively English dish: fried fish.

  MAD LIBS

  In November 1953, TV writer Leonard Stern was stuck trying to describe the appearance of a new character he’d created for The Honeymooners. His friend, game-show host Roger Price, was in the next room and Stern called out, “Give me an adjective.” But before Stern could finish his sentence—he’d needed a
word to describe “nose”—Price responded, “Clumsy.” The two found the idea of “a clumsy nose” absurdly funny and spent the rest of the day writing short stories, then removing certain words and replacing them with blank spaces, prompting the reader for a certain part of speech: a noun, adjective, verb, etc. When the stories were read back with all the blanks filled, the results were hilarious. For the next five years, Price and Stern tried, in vain, to get Mad Libs published. Finally, in 1958, they printed up 14,000 copies themselves. By then, Stern was writing for The Steve Allen Show and convinced his boss to use Mad Libs as a comedy bit. All 14,000 copies sold out in a week.

  In Tokyo, the “911” emergency number is 119.

  HOW DO YOU

  SAY...”MULLET”?

  Remember the mullet? That quintessential ’80s haircut (think MacGyver, or Billy Ray Cyrus) was short on the top, long in the back…and ridiculed by people all over the world, as you’ll see here.

  • France: Coupe à la Waddle (named after a famous 1980s footballer who sported the ’do)

  • French Canadian: coupe Longueuil

  • Sweden: hockeyfrilla

  • Norway: hockeysveis

  • Czech Republic: colek (“newt”)

  • Poland: Czeski pi karz (“Czech football player hair”)

  • Romania: chica

  • Australia: Freddie Firedrill (as if the haircut was interrupted by a fire alarm)

  • Chile: chocopanda (referring to the typical haircuts of ice cream sellers)

  • Colombia: greña paisa

  • Turkey: aslan yelesi (“lion’s mane”)

  • Brazil: Chitãozinho e Xororó

  • Denmark: bundesliga-hår

  • Croatia: fudbalerka (referring to the soccer-player haircuts of the 1980s)

  • Finland: takatukka (“rear hair”)

  • Germany: vokuhila (short for vorne kurz, hinten lang “short in the front, long in the back”)

  • Greece: laspotiras (“mudflap”)

  • Hebrew: vilon (“curtain”)

  • Argentina: Cubano

  • Japan: urufu hea (“wolf hair”)

  • Puerto Rico: playero (“beachcomber”)

  • Serbia: Tarzanka (“Tarzan”)

  • Italy: capelli alla tedesca (“German-style hair”), or alla MacGyver (hair that resembles Richard Dean Anderson’s from the TV show)

  • American terms: B&T (bridge and tunnel), ape drape, Tennessee top hat, Kentucky waterfall, Missouri compromise

  Your remote control works by shooting an invisible beam of infrared light at the TV.

  WHAT THE #!&%?

  Here are the origins of several symbols we use in everyday life.

  ?QUESTION MARK

  Origin: When early scholars wrote in Latin, they would place the word questio—meaning “question”—at the end of a sentence to indicate a query. To conserve valuable space, writing it was soon shortened to qo, which caused another problem—readers might mistake it for the ending of a word. So, they squashed the letters into a symbol: a lowercase q on top of an o. Over time the o shrank to a dot and the q to a squiggle, giving us our current question mark.

  ! EXCLAMATION POINT

  Origin: Like the question mark, the exclamation point was invented by stacking letters. The mark comes from the Latin word io, meaning “exclamation of joy.” Written vertically, with the i above the o, it forms the exclamation point we use today.

  = EQUAL SIGN

  Origin: Invented by English mathematician Robert Recorde in 1557, with this rationale: “I will sette as I doe often in woorke use, a paire of paralleles, or Gemowe [i.e., twin] lines of one length, thus: =====, bicause noe 2 thynges, can be more equalle.” His equal signs were about five times as long as the current ones, and it took more than a century for his sign to be accepted over its rival: a strange curly symbol invented by Descartes.

  & AMPERSAND

  Origin: This symbol is a stylized et, Latin for “and.” Although it was invented by the Roman scribe Marcus Tullius Tiro in the first century B.C., it didn’t get its strange name until centuries later. In the early 1800s, schoolchildren learned this symbol as the 27th letter of the alphabet: X, Y, Z, &. But the symbol had no name. So, they ended their ABCs with “and, per se, and”, meaning “&, which means ‘and.’” This phrase was slurred into one garbled word that eventually caught on with everyone: ampersand.

  According to DC Comics, the ancestors of Superman’s adoptive family, the Kents were noted abolitionists in the 19th century.

  # OCTOTHORP

  Origin: The odd name for this ancient sign for numbering derives from thorpe, the Old Norse word for a village or farm that is often seen in British placenames. According to typographers, the symbol was originally used in mapmaking, representing a village surrounded by eight fields, so it was named the octothorp.

  $ DOLLAR SIGN

  Origin: One theory on the origin of this symbol says that when the U.S. government began issuing its own money in 1794, it used the common world currency: the peso—also called the Spanish dollar. The first American silver dollars were identical to Spanish pesos in weight and value, so they took the same written abbreviation: Ps. That evolved into a P with an s written right on top of it, and when people began to omit the circular part of the p, the sign simply became an S with a vertical line through it.

  OLYMPIC RINGS

  Origin: Designed in 1913 by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the five rings represent the five regions of the world that participated in the Olympics: Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania. While the individual rings do not symbolize any single continent, the five colors—red, blue, green, yellow, and black—were chosen because at least one of them is found on the flag of every nation. The plain white background is symbolic of peace.

  “THE SYMBOL”

  Origin: Okay, so we’re running out of symbols, but this is a great pop culture story: In 1993, Prince’s dissatisfaction with his record label, Warner Bros., finally reached its peak. Despite his superstar status and his $100 million contract, the Purple One didn’t feel he had enough creative control over his music. So “in protest,” Prince announced that Prince would never perform for Warner Bros. again—this unpronounceable symbol would instead. The symbol for the Artist Formerly Known as Prince combined three ancient symbols: the male symbol, the female symbol, and the alchemy symbol for soapstone, which was supposed to reflect his artistic genius. Prince retired the symbol when his contract with Warner Bros. ran out in 2000. Today, he is again Prince.

  GROUNDS FOR DIVORCE

  Think you’re in a bad relationship? Take a look at these folks.

  In Loving, New Mexico, a woman divorced her husband because he made her salute him and address him as “Major” whenever he walked by.

  One Tarittville, Connecticut, man filed for divorce after his wife left him a note on the refrigerator. It read, “I won’t be home when you return from work. Have gone to the bridge club. There’ll be a recipe for your dinner at 7 o’clock on Channel 2.”

  In Lynch Heights, Delaware, a woman filed for divorce because her husband “regularly put itching powder in her underwear when she wasn’t looking.”

  In Honolulu, Hawaii, a man filed for divorce from his wife, because she “served pea soup for breakfast and dinner…and packed his lunch with pea sandwiches.”

  In Hazard, Kentucky, a man divorced his wife because she “beat him whenever he removed onions from his hamburger without first asking for permission.”

  In Frackville, Pennsylvania, a woman filed for divorce because her husband insisted on “shooting tin cans off of her head with a slingshot.”

  One Winthrop, Maine, man divorced his wife because she “wore earplugs whenever his mother came to visit.”

  A Smelterville, Idaho, man won divorce from his wife on similar grounds. “His wife dressed up as a ghost and tried to scare his elderly mother out of the house.”

  In Canon City, Colorado, a woman divorced her husband because he made her “
duck under the dashboard whenever they drove past his girlfriend’s house.”

  No escape: In Bennettsville, South Carolina, a deaf man filed for divorce from his wife because “she was always nagging him in sign language.”

  The Last Straw: In Hardwick, Georgia, a woman divorced her husband because he “stayed home too much and was much too affectionate.”

  America’s first DJ: Dr. Elman Myers, in 1911.

  THE LEAGUE OF

  COMIC BOOK CREATORS

  By day, they were mild-mannered writers and artists. But at night…well, they stayed mild-mannered writers and artists, but they also thought up some of the most popular comic book characters the world has ever known. Come meet the men behind the Man of Steel, the Dark Knight, and the mutants.

  SUPERMAN: Joe Schuster & Jerry Siegel

  Schuster & Siegel created Superman in 1936, when the Cleveland duo (Siegel born there, and Schuster having moved there at age nine from Toronto) tried selling the Man of Steel as a comic strip to the newspapers. No one bought it until 1938, when DC Comics gave Superman a tryout in its Action Comics book. The rest is history, and Schuster & Siegel would go on to fame and fortune, right? Not exactly. By contract, DC Comics retained all rights in the Superman character, and so while the publishing company was making millions from Superman, Schuster & Siegel were not. They weren’t doing poorly—in 1940 The Saturday Evening Post noted that the two of them were making $75,000 a year between them—but they knew they could be doing much better.

  They sued DC Comics in 1946, and in 1948 received a relatively small settlement (a reported $120,000). But the flip side of the settlement was that the duo’s byline, previously on every Superman story, was removed from all future products. Schuster soon left the comic book field, and Siegel’s work slowed to a trickle. In the 1970s, while Hollywood geared up for the Superman movie starring Christopher Reeve, Schuster & Siegel again got the word out about how badly they had been treated by DC and sued the company once more. Although the courts decided the writers didn’t have a case, DC was pressured by the comic book community into providing both men with a $35,000-per-year stipend for as long as they lived. Schuster died in 1992; Siegel passed away in 1996.