Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader Read online

  BLINKIN’ PSYCHOLOGY

  • We tend to blink faster when we’re excited or nervous. For instance, someone who’s on television tends to average between 31 and 50 blinks per minute—twice the normal rate.

  • But why? A chemical called dopamine is responsible. It’s released in the brain when we’re under stress...which triggers body arousal—faster heart rate, quicker breathing, and more rapid eyelid movement, or blinking.

  • Knowing this, psychotherapists have long thought that excessive blinking in a patient can reflect, among other things, a deep-seated desire to hide. As a result, blink rates are used to gauge subjects taking polygraph tests as well. The normal blink rate is about twenty times per minute. A faster rate signifies anxiety, emotional distress, or that the “fight or flight” response is kicking in—all indicators that someone may be lying.

  INSIDE INFO

  • FBI Special Agent, Joe Navarro, has gone so far as to identify a specific type of blink that he directly associates with someone about to lie.

  • In an online interview, Navarro explains: “On NBC’s “Today Show,” Matt Lauer talked about how Madonna had lied to him about her announced pregnancy just the other day. He showed the video and her response but he missed something to ponder about. She did what I call the eyelash flutter when asked, “Are you pregnant?”

  • It’s different under high speed camera from the eye-blink, we can see that it does not close completely and the speed is amazing. I first observed this eyelid behavior in 1985, and find that people who are troubled by a question or an event do this, especially if they have to answer and are about to lie.

  “The” is the most used word in the English language.

  • “I tell attorneys to look for the eyelash flutter when they have people on the stand; it means they really do not like the question at all. I even had a case where the individual picked out the route of escape for me when I went through several routes with him; I just waited for the flutter to pick out the way.”

  DEMOCRACY GOES ON THE BLINK

  • With the advent of video closeups, political analysts have looked for signs in the blinking of politicians. Somebody with a video recorder and a stopwatch discovered that Richard Nixon blinked twice as much as normal when answering hostile questions about Watergate and that Bill Clinton’s blinking rate went up from 51 blinks per minute to 71 when discussing Monica Lewinsky.

  • During the television debates between Michael Dukakis and George Bush, somebody else discovered that both candidates blinked faster when questions were directed to them.

  • Most recently, Boston College neuropsychologist Joe Tecce noted that George W. Bush blinked an average of 82 blinks a minute, indicating severe stress. Al Gore, on the other hand, blinked at a rate of 48 blinks a minute. Based on the previous six elections, where the slower blinker won, Tecce believed it was a sign that Gore was more likely to keep his head and win the election. However, as the election showed, the eyes didn’t have it.

  • The extremes of blinking in presidential debates? Bob Dole is “the fastest blinker among all world leaders I’ve studied,” says Tecce. He clocked a record 147 blinks per minute in his 1996 debate with Clinton. The slowest? Ross Perot, who managed a meditative 9 bpm in the three-way 1992 debate.

  DOCTOR, MY EYES

  • Excessive blinking in children is one of the symptoms that pediatricians watch for. It can mean a number of things, including allergies, chronic exposure to cigarette smoke, extreme anxiety or eye problems.

  • Rapid and habitual blinking is often the first symptom that appears in children who are developing Tourette’s Syndrome. On the other hand, sometimes it’s just a habit that a kid does because it gets him adult attention.

  Water babies: Baby sea lions have to be taught how to swim.

  WITH A NOD AND A WINK

  • Blinking eyes have many times been used as a signal. American prisoners of war appearing before movie cameras communicated secret messages in Morse code during the Vietnam War.

  • While frozen within a block of ice, magician David Blaine answered questions by blinking once for yes and twice for no.

  • However, the most extraordinary use of blinking for communication has to be writer Jean-Dominque Bauby. Profoundly paralyzed by a stroke, he lost all movement in his body except his left eyelid. Using 200,000 blinks and a very patient friend, Bauby wrote his memoirs. The book became an instant bestseller in France, but Bauby all-but-missed the excitement—he died two days after it was published.

  HISTORY PASSES IN A BLINK OR TWO

  • The Roman emperor Gaius screened gladiators based on whether they could go unblinking into the face of extreme danger. It wasn’t a foolproof test—only two of 20,000 passed it.

  • It was a blinking surgeon during the French Revolution who first demonstrated that a head lived for a short time after decapitation. Unfortunately, the head in question was his own. Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794), a French chemist who discovered oxygen, was beheaded during the Reign of Terror. Ever the scientist, before being beheaded he told a friend that he would continue blinking for as long as possible after the guillotine struck to see how long he would remain conscious. His friend reported that Lavoiser’s disembodied head blinked for about 15 seconds.

  And Speaking Of Eyes....According to a story in the Washington Times, “glass eyes” are no longer made from glass, but a hard, virtually unbreakable plastic. That’s a good thing, since 17,000 to 18,000 people lose an eyeball every year. A good replacement eye is indistinguishable from a real one, but it doesn’t come cheap—$1700 to $2500 for a custom-matched eye, made by an expert ocularist.

  Galileo went blind studying the sun through telescopes.

  10 CANDY BARS

  YOU’LL NEVER EAT

  These tidbits about extinct candy bars come from Dr. Ray Broekel, “candy bar historian” and publisher of a newsletter called the Candy Bar Gazebo.

  THE AIR MAIL BAR. Introduced in 1930 to honor the first airmail flight in the U.S.—in 1918, from Washington, D.C to New York City. Ironically, the first flight never made it to New York. After takeoff, the pilot noticed someone had forgotten to fill the fuel tank. Then he got lost over Maryland and had to land in a cow pasture. The Air Mail candy bar had a similar fate.

  FAT EMMA. In the early 1920s, the Pendergast Candy Company in Minneapolis introduced a candy bar with a nougat center. They planned to call it the Emma bar. But when it wound up twice as thick as expected (they accidentally put too much egg white in the mixture), they changed the name to Fat Emma. Later, Frank Mars copied the idea to create the Milky Way bar.

  THE SAL-LE-DANDE BAR. The first candy bar named after a stripper—Sally Rand, whose “fan dance” at the 1933-34 Chicago World’s Fair shocked and titillated the nation. In the 1960s, another stripper bar was available briefly: the Gypsy bar, named after Gypsy Rose Lee.

  THE RED GRANGE BAR. Endorsed by Red Grange, the most popular football player of his day. After starring at the University of Illinois, he joined the Chicago Bears in 1925 and helped keep the National Football League in business. Unfortunately, he couldn’t do the same for his candy bar.

  THE VEGETABLE SANDWICH BAR. One of the weirdest “health” bars ever made, this 1920s vegetable concoction contained cabbage, celery, peppers, and tomatoes. Its makers claimed it aided digestion and “will not constipate.”

  The average American throws out 1,905 pounds. of garbage every year.

  THE ZEP CANDY BAR. “Sky-High Quality.” One of several candy bars that capitalized on the popularity of “lighter-than-air” dirigibles in the 1930s. This one featured a sketch of a Graf Zeppelin on the wrapper. It was taken off the market after the Hindenburg exploded in 1937.

  THE CHICKEN DINNER BAR. One of the bestselling bars you’ve never heard of. It was introduced in the 1920s and remained on the market for about 50 years. The original wrapper featured a picture of a roasted chicken on a dinner plate—a bizarre way of suggesting it was a nourishing meal and encourag
ing consumers to associate it with prosperity (“a chicken in every pot”). The manufacturer, Sperry Candy Co., even dispatched a fleet of Model A trucks disguised as giant sheet-metal chickens to deliver the candy to stores. Several years after the bar’s debut, Sperry dropped the chicken from the wrapper. But it kept the name.

  THE BIG-HEARTED “AL” BAR. George Williamson, owner of the Williamson Candy Company, was a good Democrat and a good friend of New York governor Al Smith, Democratic nominee for president in 1928. Smith lost in a landslide to Herbert Hoover, and his candy bar soon followed.

  THE SEVEN UP CANDY BAR. Got its name from having seven connected pieces, each with a different center. The bar came out in the 1930s, before the 7-Up Bottling Company began producing its soft drink—so the Trudeau Candy Company owned the trademark rights to the name. Eventually the 7-Up Bottling Company bought the bar and retired it, so they had exclusive use of the name no matter how it was spelled—Seven Up or 7-Up.

  THE “IT” BAR. The #1 female sex symbol of the silent movie era was Clara Bow—known as the “It Girl.” (She had that special quality her movie studio called “It.”) In 1927 the McDonald Candy Company of Salt Lake City tried cashing in on her popularity with a candy bar featuring her face on the wrapper. It did well for a few years, then disappeared along with Bow. (She wasn’t able to make the switch to talkies, because although she was lovely to look at, her Brooklyn accent made her impossible to listen to.)

  Also Gone: The Betsy Ross bar, the Lindy (for Charles Lindbergh), Amos ’n’ Andy, Poor Prune, Vita Sert, and Doctor’s Orders.

  During the Middle Ages you could be accused of witchcraft if your pets disobeyed you.

  THAT’S A LOAD

  OF GARBAGE

  You think it’s a pain to take out the garbage at home? Just be glad you haven’t got these problems.

  Garbage: 400,000 pounds of “pizza sludge” (flour, tomato paste, cheese, pepperoni, etc.)

  Location: Wellston, Ohio

  Source: A Jeno’s, Inc., frozen pizza plant

  Problem: Jeno’s produced so much waste in their pizza factory that the local sewage system couldn’t accommodate it. They couldn’t bury it either, because environmental experts said it would “move in the ground” once they put it there. They had to truck it out.

  Garbage: 27 years’ worth of radioactive dog poop

  Location: Unknown

  Source: Department of Energy experiments. For almost three decades, the DOE studied the effects of radiation by feeding 3,700 beagles radiation-laden food. Each ate the food for a year and a half, and was then left to live out its life.

  Problem: No one anticipated that while the experiment was going on, the dog-doo would be dangerous and would have to be treated as hazardous waste. They saved it for decades...and finally took it to a hazardous waste facility.

  Garbage: 1,000 pounds of raspberry gelatin and 16 gallons of whipped cream

  Location: Inside a car in Provo, Utah

  Source: Evan Hansen, a student at Brigham Young University. He won a radio contest for “most outrageous stunt” by cutting the roof off a station wagon and filling the car with the dessert.

  Problem: Hansen couldn’t find any way to get rid of the Jell-O. He finally drove to a shopping center parking lot, opened his car doors, and dumped it down a storm drain. He was fined $500 for violating Utah’s Water Pollution Control Act.

  An estimated 61% of American adults read the newspaper every day.

  WHAT, ME WORRY?

  Mad magazine has a place in American pop culture as one of the most successful humor magazines ever published. It’s also great bathroom reading. Here’s a brief history.

  BACKGROUND

  In 1947 Max Gaines, owner of Educational Comics (which published biblical, scientific, and historical comic books), was killed in a boating accident. He left the business to his 25-year-old son, William, a university student.

  The younger Gaines renamed the company Entertaining Comics (EC) and got rid of the stodgy educational stuff. Instead, he started publishing more profitable crime, suspense, and horror comics like Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horrors, and House of Fear.

  THE BIRTH OF MAD

  Gaines paid his writers and artists by the page. Most of his employees preferred this—but not Harvey Kurtzman. Kurtzman was a freelancer who worked on Frontline Combat, a true-to-life battle comic that portrayed the negative aspects of war. He enjoyed writing it, but it took so long to research and write that he couldn’t make a living doing it. So he went to Gaines and asked for a raise. Gaines refused, but suggested an alternative—in addition to his current work, Kurtzman could produce a satirical comic, which would be easier and more profitable to write. Kurtzman liked the idea and immediately started creating it.

  The first issue of Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad: Humor in a Jugular Vein debuted in August 1952. It was a flop...and so were the next two issues. But Gaines didn’t know it; back then, it took so long to get sales reports that the fourth issue—which featured a Superman spoof called Superduperman—was already in the works before Gaines realized he was losing money. By then, Mad had started to sell.

  RED SCARE

  Gaines didn’t expect Mad to be as successful as his other comics, but it turned out to be the only one to survive the wave of anti-comic hysteria that swept the country during the McCarthy era.

  Can you tell which president is on the $20 bill without looking? Only 16% of Americans can.

  In 1953, Frederic Wertham, a noted psychiatrist and self-proclaimed “mental hygienist,” published a book called The Seduction of the Innocents, a scathing attack on the comic book industry. Few comics were left untouched—Wertham denounced Batman and Robin as homosexuals, branded Wonder Woman a lesbian, and claimed that words such as “arghh,” “blam,” “thunk,” and “kapow” were producing a generation of illiterates. The charges were outlandish, but the public believed it; churches across the country even held comic book burnings.

  To defend themselves, big comic book publishers established the Comics Code Authority (CCA) to set standards of “decency” for the comic industry and issue a seal of approval to comics that passed scrutiny. (Among the so-called reforms: only “classic” monsters such as vampires and werewolves could be shown; authority figures such as policemen, judges, and government officials could not be shown in a way that encouraged “disrespect for authority,” and the words “crime,” “horror,” and “weird” were banned from comic book titles.) Magazine distributors would no longer sell comics that didn’t adhere to CCA guidelines.

  Gaines refused to submit his work to the CCA, but he couldn’t withstand public pressure. By 1954, only four EC titles were left. Amazingly, Mad was one of them.

  MAD LIVES

  Gaines knew Mad wouldn’t survive long unless he did something drastic to save it. So rather than fight the CCA, he avoided it: He dropped Mad’s comic book format and turned it into a full-fledged, “slick” magazine. Thus, it was no longer subject to CCA censorship.

  The first Mad magazine was published in the summer of 1955. “We really didn’t know how Mad, the slick edition, was going to come out,” one early Mad staffer later recalled, “but the people who printed it were laughing and getting a big kick out of it, so we said This has got to be good.’”

  The first issue sold so many copies that it had to be sent back for a second printing. By 1960, sales hit 1 million copies, and Mad was being read by an estimated 58% of American college students and 43% of high school students.

  In 1967, Warner Communications, which owned DC Comics, bought Mad, but it couldn’t affect sales or editorial content: as part of the deal, Warner had to leave Gaines alone. In 1973 sales hit an all-time high of 2.4 million copies; since then they’ve leveled off at 1 million annually in the United States. There are also 12 foreign editions. Gaines died in 1992, but Mad continues to thrive.

  The average bird’s eyes take up 50% of the space in its skull.

  WHAT, ME WORRY?

 
Alfred E. Neuman has been Mad magazine’s mascot for years. But his face and even his “What me worry?” slogan predate the magazine by 50 years. They were adapted from advertising postcards issued by a turn-of-the-century dentist from Topeka, Kansas, who called himself “Painless Romaine.”

  Mad artists were able to rationalize their plagiarism, according to Harvey Kurtzman, after they discovered that Romaine himself had lifted the drawing from an illustration in a medical textbook showing a boy who had gotten too much iodine in his system.

  Kurtzman first dubbed the boy “Melvin Koznowski.” But he was eventually renamed Alfred E. Neuman, after a nerdy fictional character on the “Henry Morgan Radio Show.” Strangely enough, that character had been named after a real-life Alfred Newman, who was the composer and arranger for more than 250 movies, including The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Grapes of Wrath.

  MAD FACTS

  • In 1965, Mad magazine was turned into an off-Broadway play called The Mad Show. Notices were sent out to New York theater critics in the form of ransom notes tied to bricks. The show gave performances at 3:00 p.m. and midnight, and sold painted rocks, Ex-Lax, Liquid Drano, and hair cream in the lobby. The play got great reviews from the press and ran for two years, with bookings in Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and other major cities. It was reportedly a major influence on the creators of “Laugh In.”

  • The Mad Movie, Gaines’s first attempt to adapt Mad for the silver screen, was dumped before production began, and Up the Academy, Mad’s second effort, was so bad that Gaines paid $50,000 to have all references to the magazine edited out of the film. An animated TV series in the early 1970s was pulled before it aired. In the mid-1990s, “Mad TV” debuted on the Fox network.

  Bird droppings are the chief export of Nauru, an island nation in the western Pacific.