Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader Read online

  NOW HEAR THIS

  Q: What makes our ears ring?

  A: “Sometimes, even in a quiet room, we hear noise that seems to come from inside our heads.

  “Behind the eardrum is a bony chamber studded with three tiny, movable bones. These bones pick up vibrations from the eardrum. Deeper in the ear is a fluid-filled channel called the cochlea. Vibrations from the bones make waves in the fluid, where thousands of hair cells undulate in the sloshing fluid.

  “These hair cells are crucial. Somehow, the ripples that pass through them trigger electrical impulses, which travel along the auditory nerve—the hearing nerve—to the brain. The brain translates the signals into sound.

  “Hair cells can get hurt by loud noises, or by a knock on the head, impairing their ability to send electrical impulses through the hearing nerve. But some hair cells will be hurt in such a way that they continuously send bursts of electricity to the hearing nerve. In effect, these hair cells are permanently turned on. When the brain receives their signals, it interprets them as sound and we hear a ‘ringing,’ even in a silent room.” (From How Come?, by Kathy Wollard)

  A group of kangaroos is called a troop.

  NUKE ‘EM

  Q: Can the microwaves leak out of the box and cook the cook?

  A: “There is extremely little leakage from today’s carefully designed ovens. Moreover, the instant the door is opened, the magnetron shuts off and the microwaves immediately disappear.

  “What about the glass door? Microwaves can penetrate glass but not metal, so the glass door is covered with a perforated metal panel so you can see inside, but the microwaves can’t get through because their wavelength (43/4 inches) is simply too big to fit through the holes in the metal panel. There is no basis for the belief that it is hazardous to stand close to an operating microwave oven.” (From What Einstein Told His Cook, by Robert L. Wolke)

  POLLY WANT A FRIEND?

  Q: How do parrots talk?

  A: “Exactly why parrots can change their calls to make them sound like words is still not understood. Their ability to mimic may possibly be linked with the fact that they are highly social birds. A young parrot in captivity learns the sounds it hears around it and quickly realizes that repeating these sounds brings attention and companionship. This is perhaps a substitute for its normal social life.

  “Although they are such good mimics in captivity, parrots do not imitate other sounds in the wild. There are, however, many other species that do: mynah birds and lyrebirds, for example, do mimic the sounds they hear in their everyday lives.” (From What Makes the World Go Round?, edited by Jinny Johnson)

  CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?

  Q: Is there sound in space? If so, what’s the speed of sound there?

  A: “No, there is no sound in space. That’s because sound has to travel as a vibration in some material such as air or water or even stone. Since space is essentially empty, it cannot carry sound, at least not the sorts of sound that we are used to.” (From How Things Work, by Louis A. Bloomfield)

  How did the ancient Egyptians discover leavened bread? One theory By kneading dough with their feet—the yeast between their toes made it rise.

  CLASSIC PUBLICITY STUNTS

  Advertising costs a lot of money. So why pay for it when you can get the press to spread the word for free? All it takes is a combination of imagination, determination, and no shame whatsoever. These guys were masters at it.

  STUNTMAN: P. T. Barnum

  STUNT: “That is not a real bearded lady,” cried a paying customer at Barnum’s Museum. “It’s a bearded man wearing a dress!” The customer then had Barnum served with a subpoena and took him to court.

  IT WORKED! The trial was a public spectacle as the bearded lady, her husband, and a doctor each testified as to her femininity. Meanwhile, thousands flocked to the museum to judge for themselves. After the trial it came out that Barnum had actually hired the man to sue him…solely to drum up business.

  STUNTMAN: Press agent Marty Weiser

  STUNT: In 1974 Weiser leased a drive-in theater in Los Angeles and invited the press to attend a movie premiere…for horses. Weiser featured a “horsepitality bar” full of “horse d’oeuvres” (popcorn buckets filled with oats). And true to his word, more than 250 horses and their riders paraded into the theater, “parked” in the stalls, and watched the movie.

  IT WORKED! The odd story ran in every newspaper and newscast in town, which attracted huge crowds to the film Weiser was promoting, Mel Brooks’s Western comedy spoof, Blazing Saddles.

  STUNTMAN: Press agent Milton Crandall

  STUNT: In 1923 Denver newspapers were tipped off that a whale had been sighted on top of Pikes Peak, a 14,000-foot-high mountain in Colorado. The reporters raced up to the site to see the whale. Sure enough, just beyond the peak, occasional sprays of water shot into the air, while hundreds of spectators gathered below, shouting, “Thar she blows!”

  IT WORKED! The “whale” was actually Crandall hiding just behind the peak shooting sprays of seltzer in the air. And the shouting people were all paid to stand there in the cold for an hour. But it was worth it—for Crandall, anyway. He got just the publicity he was looking for to promote the 1922 movie, Down to the Sea in Ships.

  STUNTMAN: A “researcher” calling himself Stuart Little

  STUNT: In the 1940s, Mr. Little started a massive letter-writing campaign to the editors of newspapers across the nation. His beef: He refused to believe government statistics that claimed the average life span of a crow was only 12 years. Little was certain that crows lived longer than that. So in the letters he asked people from all over to send him authenticated reports of old crows. Little just wanted to set the record straight.

  IT WORKED! Thousands responded. Soon everyone was talking about old crows. And the makers of Old Crow bourbon whiskey—and the press agent responsible for Stuart Little’s letters—were smiling all the way to the bank.

  STUNTMAN: Publicist Harry Reichenbach

  STUNT: A group of teenage boys walked up to a store window in 1913 and saw a lithograph of a naked young woman standing in a lake. They ogled it for hours. Reichenbach complained to the head of the anti-vice society about the picture’s effect on the young, demanding they come see the outrage. They did, and began a moral crusade against it.

  IT WORKED! The picture was titled September Morn. The artist, Paul Chabas, had hired Reichenbach to drum up interest in it. Pretty soon the artist was unable to meet demand. The image showed up in magazines, on calendars, and on cigarette packs. Sailors had the woman tattooed on their forearms. The lithograph sold seven million copies, and the original painting is on display today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

  STUNTMAN: Publicist Jim Moran

  STUNT: “Don’t change horses in midstream,” says the old adage. Moran set out to prove it wrong. Wearing an Uncle Sam top hat and tails, he was photographed in the middle of the Truckee River, where he successfully leapt from a black horse to a white one. He’d had been hired by the Republican Party to inspire voters in the 1944 presidential campaign to change parties after three consecutive terms of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  Tallest monument in the U.S.: The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, at 630 feet.

  IT WORKED! Actually, no, it didn’t. FDR easily defeated Republican Thomas Dewey in the election.

  STUNTMAN: Surrealist Salvador Dalí

  STUNT: In 1939 Dalí was commissioned to create a window display for New York City’s prestigious department store Bonwit Teller. The artist’s design incorporated a female mannequin with a head of roses, ermine fingernails, a green feathered negligee, and a lobster telephone. A male mannequin wore a dinner jacket with 81 glasses of crème de menthe attached to it. Each glass was topped off with a dead fly and a straw. The only furniture in the window was a fur-lined claw-foot tub filled with water and floating narcissi (flowers).

  IT WORKED! When the window was unveiled, the Bonwit Teller staff was outraged; they took it upon themselves to alt
er the scene without asking the artist. A furious Dalí stomped into the store, tipped the water out of the tub, and pushed it through the plate-glass window. After the police showed up and arrested him, the newspapers wrote about it and radio commentators talked about it. And Dalí’s one-man show—which just happened to be opening that very evening—was packed.

  STUNTMAN: Washington Irving

  STUNT: In October 1809, a notice appeared in the New York Evening Post, describing “a small elderly gentleman dressed in an old black coat and cocked hat by the name of KNICKERBOCKER” who had gone missing. In November a notice from Knickerbocker’s landlord stated that he had found a “very curious book” among the old gent’s belongings and if the rent wasn’t paid soon, he would sell it.

  IT WORKED! Soon everyone in New York was talking about the missing author and his mysterious book. When Diedrich Knickerbocker’s book, A History of New York, was published in December, everyone wanted to read it. Only later did they discover there was no Knickerbocker, lost or found. The real author of the book, the notices, and the publicity stunt…was Washington Irving.

  Windmills originated in Iran.

  LITTLE THINGS MEAN A LOT

  “The devil’s in the details,” says an old proverb. It’s true—the littlest things can cause the biggest problems.

  APIECE OF TAPE

  In the early morning of June 17, 1972, an $80-a-week security guard named Frank Wills was patrolling the parking garage of an office complex in Washington, D.C., when he noticed that someone had used adhesive tape to prevent a stairwell door from latching. Wills removed the tape and continued on his rounds …but when he returned to the same door at 2:00 a.m., he saw it had been taped again. So he called the police, who discovered a team of burglars planting bugs in an office leased by the Democratic National Committee. This “third-rate burglary”—and the coverup that followed—grew into the Watergate scandal that forced President Richard M. Nixon to resign from office in 1974.

  A CONVERSION ERROR

  On July 23, 1983 the pilots of Air Canada flight 143 was preparing to fly from Montreal to Edmonton, Canada. The device that calculates the amount of fuel needed wasn’t working, so the pilots did the calculations by hand. Part of the process involved converting the volume of fuel to weight. They used the conversion factor of 1.77 pounds/liter…not realizing that on a Boeing 767, fuel is measured in kilograms, not pounds. (They should have used the conversion factor of .8 kilograms/liter.) Result: they didn’t load enough fuel to get them to Edmonton. While the plane was cruising at 41,000 feet over Red Lake, Ontario, it suddenly ran out of fuel and both engines quit. The pilots had no choice but to glide the 767 to an emergency landing at a former airbase at Gimli, Manitoba, something that the pilots had never trained for and that was not covered in the 767’s emergency manual, since no one ever thought that pilots would be dumb enough to let the plane run out of fuel in mid-air. No one was injured.

  Geologically speaking, we live in the Cenozoic era, which began 65 million years ago.

  YOU CALL THIS ART?

  Ever been in an art gallery and seen something that made you wonder: “Is this really art?” So have we. Is it art just because someone puts it in a gallery? You decide.

  THE ARTIST: Richard Lomas, a New Zealand painter

  THE WORKS: Bug Paintings

  THIS IS ART? In 1991 Lomas was distressed by a comment made by a fellow artist, that painting was dead. Lomas was traveling by van across North America at the time but still wanted to prove his friend wrong. So he strapped a still-wet canvas to the front of his van and drove and drove…and drove. When he finally stopped, the canvas had been reshaped by wind, sun, and a lot of splattered bugs. Inspired by his creation, he has since driven more than 8,000 miles making more “masterpieces.” He’s even strapped his canvases to the front of trains. “My paintings may contain dead matter,” he says, “but they stimulate lively debate.”

  THE ARTIST: SAW Gallery in Ottawa, Canada

  THE WORK: Scatalogue: 30 Years of Crap in Contemporary Art

  THIS IS ART? The gallery’s curator, Stefan St. Laurent, was lamenting that “people who live in this Western society can’t really deal with their own excrement.” So to help them, he commissioned works for an unusual exhibit. The pieces include a sculpture of former prime minister Brian Mulroney holding feces in his outstretched hand, a performance video featuring actors posing with toilets, and last (but not least), a genuine pair of soiled trousers. According to St. Laurent, the show tackled such issues as racism, homophobia, sexism, anti-Semitism, globalization, and consumerism. Visitors were also invited to check out the Scatalogue Boutique, where they could purchase cow-pie clocks.

  THE ARTIST: Michael Landy, a London conceptual artist

  THE WORK: Break Down

  THIS IS ART? By age 37, Landy had become so fed up with materialism that he gathered every single thing he owned—7,006 items in all—and staged their destruction in a 14-day exhibit he called an “examination of consumerism.” As Landy supervised, 12 workers systematically destroyed everything from family heirlooms to dirty socks to his Saab 900. They smashed the big stuff with hammers and shredded the smaller stuff, reducing all of it to piles of pebble-sized trash, destined to end up in a landfill. More than 45,000 spectators witnessed the “art piece.” His next work: Getting new credit cards, new keys, a new passport, a new birth certificate, new shoes, and a new suit. “I found it a bit soul-destroying,” he said. “I really didn’t want to buy anything.”

  The Venus flytrap only grows wild in one place: a 100-mile stretch of Carolina swampland.

  THE ARTIST: Marilene Oliver, a London art student

  THE WORK: I Know You Inside Out

  THIS IS ART? In 1993 a convicted killer named Joseph Jernigan was put to death by lethal injection. After the execution, Jernigan’s body was frozen, then sliced (crosswise) into 1,871 micro-thin cross-sections and photographed for medical students. The images were also posted on the Internet, which is where Marilene Oliver found them in 2001. She printed them out, cut them to shape, and stacked them to create a life-size figure of the murderer.

  Still not satisfied, Oliver scanned her own skin on a flatbed scanner and created a touch screen display next to the Jernigan figure, kind of like Adam and Eve. This one she called I Know Every Inch of Your Body.

  MORE “ART”

  How to Make a Quick Buck: First, get a cup of coffee in a Styrofoam cup. Drink the coffee. Attach the coffee-stained cup to a piece of wood. Find a dead ladybug. Attach that to the same piece of wood. Call the piece Untitled and enter it into a New York City art auction. That’s what modern artist Tom Friedman did in 1999. The winning bid: $29,900.

  How to Get Rid of a Stack of Newspapers: At the same auction an unnamed artist entered a piece that consisted of a stack of newspapers. He called it Stack of Newspapers. Unfortunately for him, no bids were made on the “artwork.”

  And the idea wasn’t even original—the previous year, artist Robert Gober had entered a tied stack of newspapers into a Sotheby’s auction which he called, Newspaper, 1992. It sold for $19,000.

  Bad sign: Mozambique has an AK-47 assault rifle on its flag.

  THE TIME IT TAKES

  It takes the average bathroom reader one minute and fifteen seconds to read the average page of a Bathroom Reader. Here are some more examples of how long things take (or took).

  • .05 second for a human muscle to respond to stimulus

  • .06 second for an automotive airbag to fully inflate

  • .2 second for the Int’l Space Station to travel 1 mile

  • .46 second for a 90-mph fastball to reach home plate

  • .6 second for an adult to walk one step

  • 1 second for a humming-bird’s wings to beat 70 times

  • 1.25 seconds for light to travel from the moon to Earth

  • 3 seconds for 475 lawsuits to be filed around the world

  • 4 seconds for 3,000,000 gallons of water to flow over Niagara Falls />
  • 10 seconds for 50 people to be born

  • 20 seconds for a fast talker to say 100 words

  • 58 seconds for the elevator in Toronto’s CN Tower to reach the top (1,815 feet)

  • 1 minute for a newborn baby’s brain to grow 1.5 mg

  • 45 minutes to reach an actual person when calling the IRS during tax time

  • 4 hours for the Titanic to sink after it struck the iceberg

  • 4 hrs, 30 min to cook a 20-pound turkey at 325°F

  • 92 hrs to read both the Old and New Testaments aloud

  • 96 hours to completely recover from jet lag

  • 6 days, according to the Bible, to create the universe

  • 7 days for a newborn baby to wet or soil 80 diapers

  • 19 days until baby cardinals make their first flight

  • 25 days for Handel to compose “The Messiah”

  • 29 days, 12 hrs, 44 mins, and 3 secs from a new moon to a new moon

  Dough doe? Animal Crackers come in 18 different “species.”

  • 30 days for a human hair to grow half an inch

  • 35 days for a mouse to reach sexual maturity

  • 38 days for a slow boat to get to China (from New York)

  • 12 weeks for a U.S. Marine to go through boot camp

  • 89 days, 1 hour, for winter to come and go

  • 91 days, 7 hrs, 26 mins, and 24 secs for the Earth to fall into the Sun if it loses its orbit

  • 258 days for the gestation period of a yak

  • 1 year for Los Angeles to move two inches closer to San Francisco (due to the shifting of tectonic plates)

  • 2 years for cheddar cheese to reach its peak flavor

  • 4 yrs, 8 mos to receive your FBI file after making the appropriate request

  • 6 years in a snail’s life span

  • 25 years equals the time the average American spends asleep in a lifetime