Uncle John’s Briefs Read online

  Line: “This is a great wall!”

  Supposedly Said By: President Richard Nixon

  Actually: It’s one of the lines used to denigrate Nixon…and he did say it to Chinese officials in 1972 when he saw the Great Wall for the first time. But it’s a bum rap. As Paul Boller and John George write in They Never Said It:

  This was not his complete sentence, and out of context it sounds silly. It is only fair to put it back into its setting: “When one stands here,” Nixon declared, “and sees the wall going to the peak of this mountain and realizes it runs for hundreds of miles—as a matter of fact, thousands of miles—over the mountains and through the valleys of this country and that it was built over 2,000 years ago, I think you would have to conclude that this is a great wall and that it had to be built by a great people.”

  Of the 28,000 people in Japan who are over 100 years old, 85% are women.

  Line: “Let them eat cake.”

  Supposedly Said By: Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, when she was told that conditions were so bad that the peasants had no bread to eat

  Actually: She was alleged to have said it just before the French Revolution. But the phrase had already been used by then. It has been cited as an old parable by philosopher Henri Rousseau in 1778—a decade or so before Marie Antoinette supposedly said it. Chances are, it was a rumor spread by her political enemies.

  Line: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.”

  Supposedly Said By: Mark Twain

  Actually: Twain, one of America’s most quotable writers, was quoting someone else: Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli of England.

  Line: “Keep the government poor and remain free.”

  Supposedly Said By: Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

  Actually: Ronald Reagan said it during a speech and attributed the line to Holmes. But Holmes never said it, and it wasn’t written by a speechwriter, either. Reagan’s “speechwriting office” later told a reporter, “He came up with that one himself.

  HOLY BAT FACTS!

  • Most species of bats live 12 to 15 years, but some live as long as 30 years. Some species can fly as fast as 60 miles per hour and as high as 10,000 feet.

  • Bats are social animals and live in colonies in caves. The colonies can get huge: Bracken Cave in Texas contains an estimated 20 million Mexican free-tailed bats.

  • Vampire bats drink blood through a “drinking straw” that the bat makes with its tongue and lower lip. The bats’ saliva contains an anticoagulant that keeps blood flowing by impeding the formation of blood clots.

  • It’s not uncommon for a vampire bat to return to the same animal night after night, weakening and eventually killing it.

  How'd they get airmail? From 1939–42, there was an underwater post office in the Bahamas.

  PLOP, PLOP, QUIZ, QUIZ

  We thought it might be fun to test your ad slogan IQ. How many products and brands can you recognize by their slogans? Answers are on page 284.

  1. “Good to the last drop.”

  2. “You’re in good hands.”

  3. “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.”

  4. “A little dab’ll do ya.”

  5. “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.”

  6. “The beer that made Milwaukee famous.”

  7. “We answer to a higher authority.”

  8. “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz.”

  9. “When it rains, it pours!”

  10. “Don’t leave home without it.”

  11. “Ask the man who owns one.”

  12. “I liked it so much I bought the company.”

  13. “Takes a licking and keeps on ticking.”

  14. “Reach out and touch someone.”

  15. “Let your fingers do the walking.”

  16. “It keeps going, and going, and going.”

  17. “Come to where the flavor is.”

  18. “It helps the hurt stop hurting.”

  19. “It does a body good.”

  20. “It’s what’s for dinner.”

  21. “We love to fly and it shows.”

  22. “And we thank you for your support.”

  23. “Rich Corinthian leather.”

  24. “Celebrate the moments of your life.”

  25. “Manly, yes, but I like it, too.”

  26. “Generation Next.”

  27. “We’ll leave the light on for you.”

  28. “Better living through chemistry.”

  A red blood cell is about 8 microns wide—less than half the width of a human hair.

  NOT WHAT

  THEY SEEM TO BE

  Things (and people) aren’t always what they seem. Here are some peeks behind the image.

  JOHN JAMES AUDUBON

  Image: Considered a pioneer of American wildlife conservation, this 19th-century naturalist spent days at a time searching for birds in the woods so he could paint them. The National Audubon Society was founded in 1905 in his honor.

  Actually: Audubon found the birds, then shot them. In addition to painting, he was an avid hunter. According to David Wallechinsky in Significa, “He achieved unequaled realism by using freshly killed models held in lifelike poses by wires. Sometimes he shot dozens of birds just to complete a single picture.”

  WASHINGTON CROSSING THE DELAWARE

  Image: One of the most famous paintings of American history depicts General George Washington—in a fierce battle against the redcoats—leading his men across the Delaware River on Christmas Eve 1776.

  Actually: It was painted 75 years after the battle by a German artist named Leutze. He used American tourists as models and substituted the Rhine River for the Delaware. He got the style of boat wrong; the clothing was wrong; even the American flag was incorrect. Yet the drama of the daring offensive was vividly captured, making it one of our most recognized paintings.

  WEBSTER’S DICTIONARY

  Image: The oldest and most trusted dictionary in the United States, created in 1828 by Noah Webster.

  Actually: “The truth is,” says M. Hirsh Goldberg in The Book of Lies, “is that any dictionary maker can put Webster’s in the name, because book titles can’t be copyrighted.” And a lot of shoddy publishers do just that. To know if your Webster’s is authentic, make sure it’s published by Merriam-Webster, Inc.

  If an animal has a tail, it’s caudate; if it doesn’t have a tail, it’s anurous.

  LEFT-HANDED FACTS

  Here are some tidbits about lefties. Why devote more than one page to the subject? Because we don’t want the southpaws to feel left out. Alright?

  LEFT-HANDED STATS

  • Lefties make up about 5% to 15% of the general population—but 15% to 30% of all patients in mental institutions.

  • They’re more prone to allergies, insomnia, migraines, schizophrenia and a host of other things than right-handers. They’re also three times more likely than righties to become alcoholics. Why? Some scientists speculate the right hemisphere of the brain—the side left-handers use the most—has a lower tolerance for alcohol than the left side. Others think the stress of living in a right-handed world is responsible.

  • Lefties are also more likely to be on the extreme ends of the intelligence scale than the general population: a higher proportion of mentally disabled people and people with IQs over 140 are lefties.

  LEFT OUT OF SCIENCE

  • For centuries science was biased against southpaws. In the 1870s, for example, Italian psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso published The Delinquent Male, in which he asserted that left-handed men were psychological “degenerates” and prone to violence. (A few years later he published The Delinquent Female, in which he made the same claims about women.)

  • This theory existed even as late as the 1940s, when psychiatrist Abram Blau wrote that left-handedness “is nothing more than an expression of infantile negativism and falls into the same category as…general perverseness.” He speculated that lefties didn’t get enough attention f
rom their mothers.

  LEFT-HANDED TRADITIONS

  • Why do we throw salt over our left shoulders for good luck? To throw it into the eyes of the Devil, who, of course, lurks behind us to our left.

  • In many traditional Muslim cultures, it is extremely impolite to touch food with your left hand. Reason: Muslims eat from communal bowls using their right hand; their left hand is used to perform “unclean” tasks such as wiping themselves after going the bathroom. Hindus have a similar custom: they use their right hand exclusively when touching themselves above the waist, and use only the left hand to touch themselves below the waist.

  Heavy! The Earth’s atmosphere weighs about 5,517,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms.

  • What did traditional Christians believe was going to happen on Judgement Day? According to custom, God blesses the saved with his right hand—and casts sinners out of Heaven with his left.

  • Other traditional mis-beliefs:

  If you have a ringing in your left ear, someone is cursing you. If your right ear rings, someone is praising you.

  If your left eye twitches, you’re going to see an enemy. If the right twitches, you’re going to see a friend.

  If you get out of bed with your left foot first, you’re going to have a bad day.

  If your left palm itches, you’re going to owe someone money. If your right palm does, you’re going to make some money.

  LEFT-HANDED MISCELLANY

  • Why are lefties called “southpaws”? In the late 1890s, most baseball parks were laid out with the pitcher facing west and the batter facing east (so the sun wouldn’t be in his eyes). That meant left-handed pitchers threw with the arm that faced south. So Chicago sportswriter Charles Seymour began calling them “southpaws.”

  • Right-handed bias: Some Native American tribes strapped their children’s left arms to the mother’s cradleboard, which caused most infants to become predominantly right-handed. In South Africa, people achieved similar results by burying the left hands of left-handed children in the burning desert sand.

  • The next time you see a coat of arms, check to see if it has a stripe running diagonally across it. Most stripes are called bends and run from the top left to the bottom right. A stripe that runs from the bottom left to the top right, is called a “left-handed” bend or a bend sinister—and means the bearer was a bastard.

  “What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case I definitely overpaid for my carpet.” —Woody Allen

  DRINK UP

  The origins of three of America’s favorite drinks.

  MOUNTAIN DEW. Invented in the 1940s by Ally Hartman of Knoxville, it was intended as a chaser for Tennessee whiskey. The original version looked and tasted like 7-Up, but after Hartman sold the formula in 1954, a succession of new owners tinkered with it. According to one account, credit for the final version goes to William H. Jones, who bought the formula in 1961 and sold it to Pepsi three years later. “He fixed it so it had just a little more tang to it, mainly by adding citrus flavoring and caffeine,” a business associate recalls. “He’d take little cups marked A, B, C, and D around to high schools and factories and ask people which mixture tasted best. That’s how he developed his formula.”

  V-8 JUICE. In 1933, W. G. Peacock founded the New England Products Company and began manufacturing spinach juice, lettuce juice, and other vegetable juices. Even though the country was in the midst of a health craze, few people wanted to drink Peacock’s concoctions. So he began mixing the drinks together, hoping to find something more marketable. It took about a year, but he finally came up with a drink he called Vege-min—a combination of tomato, celery, carrot, spinach, lettuce, watercress, beet, and parsley juices. The label had a huge V for Vege-min and a large 8 listing the different juices. One day, as he gave a free sample to a grocer in Evanston, Illinois, a clerk suggested he just call the product V-8.

  A&W ROOT BEER. Roy Allen made a living buying and selling hotels…until he met an old soda fountain operator who gave him a formula for root beer. “You can make a fortune with a five-cent root beer,” the guy told him. It was during Prohibition when beer was illegal, so Allen decided there was a market for a root beer stand that looked like a Wild West “saloon”—including a bar and sawdust on the floor. The first stand, opened in Lodi, California, in 1919, did so well that Allen opened a second one in nearby Stockton and made one of his employees, Frank Wright, a partner. In 1922 they named the company A&W, after their own initials.

  FIRSTS

  Q: What does everything in the world have in common? A: There was a first one.

  First brewery in North America: opened in New Amsterdam (Manhattan) in 1612.

  First professional sports organization in the United States: the Maryland Jockey Club, founded in 1743.

  First American to fly in a hot air balloon: Edward Warren (1784).

  First American cookbook: American Cookery, published by Amelia Simmons in 1796.

  First refrigerator: invented by Thomas Moore in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1803.

  First flea circus performance: took place in New York City in 1835.

  First American novel to sell a million copies: Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852).

  First drive-in movie theater: opened in Camden, New Jersey, in 1933. (Picture shown: Wives Beware, starring Adolphe Menjou.)

  First female celebrity to wear pants in public: Actress Sarah Bernhardt was photographed wearing men’s trousers in 1876.

  First blood transfusion: June 1667, by Jean-Baptiste Denys, a French doctor, to a 15-year-old boy. (He got lamb’s blood.)

  First electric hand drill: invented by Wilhelm Fein of Norwell, Massachusetts, in 1895.

  First tank: built in 1916 and nicknamed “Little Willie,” it could only go 2 mph and never saw duty in battle.

  First drink of Kool-Aid: taken by chemist Edwin Perkins of Hastings, Nebraska, in 1927.

  World’s first flight attendant: Ellen Church, hired in 1930. (She wanted to be a pilot.)

  First coast-to-coast direct-dial phone call: made from Englewood, New Jersey, to Alameda, California, in 1951.

  First Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader: went to press in 1988.

  A polar bear can smell a seal up to 18 miles away under a sheet of ice.

  YAH-HAH, EVIL

  SPIDER WOMAN!

  Until recently, law required all movies made in Hong Kong to have English subtitles. But producers spent as little on translations as possible…and it shows. These gems are actual subtitles from action movies.

  “Take my advice, or I’ll spank you without pants.”

  “Fatty, you with your thick face have hurt my instep.”

  “You always use violence. I should’ve ordered glutinous rice chicken.”

  “Who gave you the nerve to get killed here?”

  “This will be of fine service for you, you bag of the scum. I am sure you will not mind that I remove your toenails and leave them out on the dessert floor for ants to eat.”

  “A normal person wouldn’t steal pituitaries.”

  “That may disarray my intestines.”

  “The bullets inside are very hot. Why do I feel so cold?”

  “Beware! Your bones are going to be disconnected.”

  “I am darn unsatisfied to be killed in this way.”

  “If you don’t eat people, they’ll eat you.”

  “She’s terrific. I can’t stand her.”

  “Darn, I’ll burn you into a BBQ chicken.”

  “I’ll cut your fats out, don’t you believe it?”

  “Sex fiend, you’ll never get reincarnated!”

  “How can I make love without TV?”

  “I got knife scars more than the number of your leg’s hair!”

  “Yah-hah, evil spider woman! I have captured you by the short rabbits and can now deliver you violently to your doctor for a thorough extermination.”

  “What is a soul? It’s just a toilet paper.”

  The first minute of the
day officially starts at 12:00 midnight.

  CANADIANS ON CANADA

  Some quotes from the Great White North.

  “Canada is a country whose main exports are hockey players and cold fronts. Our main import is acid rain.”

  —Pierre Trudeau

  “I have to spend so much time explaining to Americans that I am not English and to Englishmen that I am not American that I have little time left to be Canadian.”

  —Laurence J. Peter

  “Canada is the essence of not being: not English; not American. And a subtle flavour—we’re more like…celery.”

  —Mike Myers

  “We’ll explain the appeal of curling to you if you explain the appeal of the National Rifle Association to us.”

  —Andy Barrie, radio host

  “Canadians don’t have a very big political lever. We’re nice guys.”

  —Paul Henderson, athlete

  “Maybe you live somewhere that doesn’t have snow in April; if so, I hope you appreciate it.”

  —Spider Robinson, author

  “Hockey captures the essence of Canadian experience. In a land so inescapably and inhospitably cold, hockey is the chance of life, and an affirmation that despite the deathly chill of winter we are alive.”

  —Stephen Leacock

  “Canadians are the people who learned to live without the bold accents of the natural ego-trippers of other lands.”

  —Marshall McLuhan

  “The great themes of Canadian history are as follows: keeping the Americans out, the French in, and trying to get the Natives to somehow disappear.”

  —Will Ferguson

  “There’s something romantic about being Canadian. We’re a relatively unpopulated, somewhat civilized, clean, and resourceful country.”

  —k. d. lang

  “I speak English and French, not Klingon. I drink Labatt’s, not Romulan Ale…My name is