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  Judge: Carlos Garza, a New Mexico magistrate judge

  Background: After recusing himself from a 2006 drunk-driving case involving a woman he was dating, Garza told a court clerk to clear the woman’s license of the charge before she met the legal requirements for having it cleared. In another incident with the same woman, Garza tried to intimidate a deputy marshal who pulled the woman over for speeding. Garza, a passenger in the car, reportedly told the deputy, “I’ll take care of these tickets. Do you know who I am?” Garza got himself in even deeper trouble when he failed to comply with a Judicial Standards Commission order that he submit to a drug test. He eventually did take the test...and was found to have 14 times the legal limit for passive exposure to cocaine in his system. The commission also accused him of cutting the hair on his head and body to prevent samples being taken for the drug test. (Garza claims that’s not why he cut his hair.)

  What Happened: Garza ran for reelection unopposed in November 2006 and won; the next day the state Supreme Court barred him from the bench for life and ordered him to pay $16,000 to reimburse the Judicial Standards Commission for the cost of its investigation.

  Update: Garza made headlines again in April 2008 when he was arrested for failure to appear in what had once been his own court, where he was scheduled to go on trial for driving with a suspended license, failure to display registered license plates, and speeding.

  YOU’RE NEVER TOO OLD...

  Because age is just a number.

  At age 76: Min Bahadur Sherchan successfully climbed Mount Everest in 2008. He’s the oldest person ever to do it.

  At age 83: Thomas Edison applied for his 1,093rd—and final—patent (1931). The invention: a holder for items being electroplated.

  At age 84: Eamon de Valera won a second term as Ireland’s president (1966), making him the oldest democratically elected head of state in history.

  At age 86: Doc Paskowitz, subject of the 2007 film Surfwise, still surfed every day.

  At age 86: Katherine Pelton swam the 200m butterfly in 3:01:14, beating the 85- to 89-year-old men’s record by more than 20 seconds (1992).

  At age 87: Mary Baker Eddy founded The Christian Science Monitor newspaper (1908).

  At age 87: Bob Hope entertained the troops, traveling with a USO show that went to Saudi Arabia in 1990 during Operation Desert Storm.

  At age 88: Michelangelo drew the architectural plans for Rome’s Santa Maria degli Angeli church (1563).

  At age 89: Betty White won the 2010 Screen Actors Guild award for comedy actress (Hot in Cleveland)...a year after winning SAG’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

  At age 90: Painter Marc Chagall became the first living artist to be exhibited at Paris’s Louvre museum (1977).

  At age 92: Dr. Paul Spangler of San Luis Obispo, California, ran his 14th marathon.

  At age 93: P.G. Wodehouse wrote his 96th book in 1975, the same year he was knighted.

  At age 95: A retired union organizer named Bernard Herzberg earned a Master of Arts in Refugee Studies at the University of East London (2005).

  At age 102: Alice Pollock published her memoir Portrait of My Victorian Youth (1971). It was her first book.

  In 1978 Colorado outlawed using an apostrophe in Pike’s Peak. Now it’s “Pikes Peak.”

  Q&A:

  ASK THE EXPERTS

  Everyone’s got a question they’d like answered—basic stuff like, “Why is the sky blue?” Here are a few questions, with answers from the world’s top trivia experts.

  OVER PRESSURE

  Q: Why do our ears “pop” at high altitudes?

  A: “As you go upward, the air gets thinner and lighter. If you have some heavier air from a lower level trapped inside your ears you may be able to feel the difference. As you go higher, the heavy air inside your ears presses outward on the eardrums harder than the light air pushes inward. If the heavier air escapes suddenly so that the pressure becomes equal all at once, you hear a tiny ‘pop.’ This is more apt to happen coming down than going up. Swallowing helps to keep the pressure on the inside of the ears even with the pressure on the outside.” (From Questions Children Ask, by Edith and Ernest Bonhivert)

  1 IF BY LAND, 0.868976 IF BY SEA

  Q: Why are a statute (land) mile and a nautical mile different lengths?

  A: “In 1593 Queen Elizabeth I established the statute mile as 5,280 feet (1,609 meters). It’s based on walking distance, and originated with the Romans, who designated 1,000 paces as a land mile. The nautical mile isn’t based on human locomotion, but on the circumference of the Earth. There was wide disagreement on the precise measurement, but by 1954 the United States adopted the International Nautical Mile of 1,852 meters (6,076 feet). So 1 nautical mile equals 1.1508 statute miles; and 1 statue mile equals 0.868976 nautical miles.” (From The Handy Science Answer Book, by the Science/Technology Dept. of the Carnegie Library Assoc.)

  BOUNCING AROUND THE ROOM

  Q: Where does the force come from when you are thrown across a room after touching a live electrical connection?

  A: “It’s not the electricity itself that throws you. The force comes from your own muscles. When a large electrical current runs through your body, your muscles are stimulated to contract powerfully—much harder than they can be made to contract voluntarily. The electric current typically flows into one arm, through the abdomen, and out of one or both legs, which can cause most of the muscles in the body to contract at once. The results are unpredictable, but given the strength of the leg and back muscles, the shock can send the victim flying across the room.” (From The Last Word: Questions & Answers, edited by Mick O’Hare)

  Technically, the “high seas” are waters 12 or more nautical miles beyond a nation’s territory.

  GENDER BENDER

  Q: Why do men have lower voices than women?

  A: “In the human voice box, known as the larynx and located in the throat, there are strings called vocal cords. These strings give sound to the voice when vibrated by wind from the lungs. The deeper voices of men are due to the longer and thicker cords in the voice box. In boys, vocal cords keep growing until about age 13, when they become fully grown. A boy’s voice makes a sudden change when he reaches maturity because the greatest amount of growth takes place at that time. That’s when his voice ‘breaks.’” (From How a Fly Walks Upside Down, by Martin M. Goldwyn)

  PALIN COMPARISON

  Q: Can you really see Russia from Alaska?

  A: “Yes, but only the boring parts. Russia and Alaska are divided by the Bering Strait, which is about 55 miles at its narrowest. In the middle of the Bering Strait are two small islands: Big Diomede, in Russian territory, and Little Diomede, which is part of the United States. At their closest, these islands are a little less than two and a half miles apart, which means that, on a clear day, you can definitely see one from the other. If you stand on high ground on the tip of St. Lawrence Island—a larger Alaskan island—you can see the Russian mainland, about 37 miles away. It’s not as if Alaskans can see into the heart of the Kremlin, though. The region you’d see is Chukotka, a desolate expanse of about 285,000 square miles with a population of about 55,000. That’s an area roughly the size of Texas with a population the size of Pine Bluff, Arkansas.” (From Slate magazine, “Can You Really See Russia From Alaska?” by Nina Shen Rastogi)

  Hi, Mom!

  THE WAY WE WEREN’T

  Ah, this reminds Uncle John of a page he wrote a long time ago...

  “Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson: You find the present tense, but the past perfect.”

  —Owens Lee Pomeroy

  “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.”

  —Franklin P. Adams

  “The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealized past.”

  —Robertson Davies

  “It’s never safe to be nostalgic about something until you’re absolutely certain there’s no chance of its coming back.”


  —Bill Vaughn

  “There is no greater sorrow than to recall a happy time when miserable.”

  —Dante Alighieri

  “When people talk about the good old days, I say to people, ‘It’s not the days that are old, it’s you that’s old.’ I hate the good old days. What is important is that today is good.”

  —Karl Lagerfeld

  “People have this obsession. They want you to be like you were in 1969, because otherwise their youth goes with you. It’s very selfish...but it’s understandable.”

  —Mick Jagger

  “What is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?”

  —Letitia Elizabeth Landon

  “Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again.”

  —F. Scott Fitzgerald

  “The best time is always yesterday.”

  —Tatyana Tolstaya

  “Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.”

  —Doug Larson

  “How sad and bad and mad it was—but then, how it was sweet.”

  —Robert Browning

  A dirty spark plug can reduce your car’s fuel efficiency by as much as 30%.

  THE ECONOMY

  IN BRIEF(S)

  When economists want to get a sense of how the economy is doing, they look at things like the prime lending rate, the unemployment rate, and the Dow Jones Average. It turns out that’s not all they look at.

  DOWN UNDER

  Alan Greenspan was the chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006. He was one of the most influential economists of his day, and his grasp of how the American economy works was profound. He was also famous for keeping an eye on an economic indicator that, on the surface at least, didn’t seem to have much to do with the economy at all: sales of men’s underwear.

  What interested Greenspan about men’s underwear was that the sales figures rarely changed. For most men, underwear isn’t something they treat themselves to when they feel like splurging; it’s a purely utilitarian item. They buy it to replace underwear that has worn out. And since underwear wears out at a pretty steady rate, sales of new underwear are pretty steady too.

  Greenspan noticed, however, that on occasion underwear sales did dip. When that happened, he interpreted it to mean that significant numbers of men were financially stressed enough that they had stopped replacing their worn-out shorts.

  FIRST THINGS FIRST

  How many people see you in your underwear? When funds are limited, most men will put off buying underwear—clothes that people don’t see—before they stop buying shirts and pants that people do see, if for no other reason than to keep up appearances. If they have kids, men will put off buying their own underwear before they’ll stop buying things for their children. For this reason, men’s underwear sales tend to lead many other economic indicators—they register signs of economic distress months before sales of other items begin to slow. That’s why Greenspan liked to keep an eye on it: If the economy was losing steam, he’d see it in men’s underwear first.

  Amount of fat in the McDonald’s Big Macs America eats every year: 35 million lbs.

  THIS, THAT, AND THE OTHER THING

  Over the years, economists have developed theories based on a lot of other items besides men’s underwear. For example:

  • Boxcars. This is something that Uncle John can see right outside his window. A lot of freight is shipped by rail in the United States, and when the freight isn’t moving, the unused boxcars are parked on railroad spur lines (including the one across the street from the Bathroom Readers’ Institute) until the economy picks up and they’re needed again.

  • Movie Tickets. As expensive as a trip to the multiplex is nowadays, it’s still a lot cheaper than a weekend at the beach. People who can’t afford to take a vacation often compensate by going to the movies instead, causing ticket sales to rise in a recession.

  • Donuts. People who can’t afford a full breakfast in a restaurant will often trade down to a donut and coffee. Hot dog sales do well in hard times for the same reason: In the 1930s, they were known as “Depression sandwiches.”

  • Laxatives. When people are under stress and living on donuts and hot dogs...well, you figure it out.

  • Lipstick. Studies show that women who don’t have the money for a new dress or new shoes will spend $15 or $20 on lipstick instead. Belts, scarves, bracelets, and other fashion accessories that dress up old outfits also do well, as do home permanents and dye kits that offer a cheap alternative to hair salons.

  • Alligators. Most gators that end up as boots, handbags, and other designer goods are raised on farms. Sales of these items tend to crash during a recession (they’re too expensive and too flashy in hard times), and the alligator population on these farms explodes.

  • Lightbulbs. When Jack Welch took the helm at General Electric in 1981, the company made more than just lightbulbs, but he still swore by sales of bulbs as an indicator of where the economy was heading. “When people are affluent, they go to the store and buy what’s called ‘pantry inventory,’” he told an interviewer in 2001. “They’ll buy a pack of six or a pack of eight, and they’ll wait for the lights to go out. When times are tough, a light burns out, they’ll go buy one to replace the one went out. There are probably a thousand better indicators, but that one’s never been wrong.”

  Banker slang for people who pay off their credit cards in full each month: “deadbeats.”

  BEN THERE, DONE THAT

  Where has this awesome quote page Ben all our lives?

  “A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.”

  —Benjamin Franklin, statesman

  “We have to try to score more points than they do.”

  —Ben Roethlisberger, QB, on how to win a Super Bowl

  “We don’t point a pistol at our own forehead. That is not the way to conduct negotiations.”

  —Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister

  “Do unto others, then run.”

  —Benny Hill, comedian

  “God help me if I ever do another movie with an explosion in it. You’ll know I’ve lost all my money.”

  —Ben Affleck, actor

  “A fool may talk, but a wise man speaks.”

  —Ben Jonson, English poet

  “If you do nothing long enough, something’s bound to happen.”

  —H. Jon Benjamin, comedian

  “I’m not Jack Nicholson. I’m not Brando. But I do mumble.”

  —Benicio Del Toro, actor

  “When a man recalls the good old days, he’s really thinking of his bad young days.”

  —Ben Stein, writer and actor

  “Who is more foolish: the fool, or the fool who follows him?”

  —Ben Kenobi, Jedi Master

  “The magician and the politician have much in common: They both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.”

  —Ben Okri, Nigerian poet

  “The disappointment of manhood succeeds the delusion of youth.”

  —Benjamin Disraeli, British prime minister

  “Relax? How can you play golf and relax? You have to grip the club, don’t you?”

  —Ben Hogan, golf legend

  “Bonnnnnnng!”

  —Big Ben, clock

  Florida pharmacist Benjamin Green invented suntan lotion in 1944.

  THERE’S A RECORD

  FOR THAT?

  Anybody can run fast or eat a bunch of hot dogs, but it takes true commitment to be the world-record prune-eater.

  • BROOM-BALANCING. Leo Bircher (Switzerland) holds the record for balancing a broom—on his nose—for a record time of two hours, one minute.

  • CHRISTMAS TREE-BALANCING. David Downes (England) balanced a seven-foot-tall tree on his chin for 56.82 seconds.

&
nbsp; • TYPING. In October 1987, Jens Seiler (Germany) typed 626 keystrokes, about 100 words, in a minute. More impressively, he typed the words backward.

  • BALLOON-STUFFING. Ralf Schuler (Germany) holds two records: 1) the most people stuffed inside a latex balloon—23, and 2) the fastest time to stuff someone (himself) into a latex balloon—37.1 seconds.

  • PRUNE-EATING. In 1984 Alan Newbold (USA) ate 150 dried plums in 31 seconds. (And then, presumably, a few hours later, Newbold set another record.)

  • WAITING. Jeff Tweiten and John Goth (USA) queued up to see Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones outside a Seattle movie theater on January 1, 2002...and stayed there until the film opened four and a half months later, on May 16.

  • BEAN-EATING. Kerry White (England) holds the world record for eating baked beans, consuming 12,547 beans (in sauce) in a 24-hour period. Barry Kirk (England) sat in a cold bath of baked beans for 100 hours in September 1986.

  • GUM-WRAPPER CHAIN. Gary Duschl (USA) has been purchasing gum and collecting wrappers since 1965, and in 2004 he claimed the record for the world’s longest gum-wrapper chain. He’s still adding to it, and as of March 2011, it consisted of 1,581,159 gum wrappers and measured 66,835 feet—more than 12 miles.

  When you blush, so does the lining in your stomach.

  • EAR-WIGGLING. Not many people can wiggle their ears at all. Jitendra Kumar (India) wiggled his 147 times in one minute.

  • EXTREME HULA-HOOPING. In 2000 Roman Schedler (Austria) hula-hooped for 71 seconds straight. That may not seem very long, but he did it with a 53-pound tractor tire.

  • DRUMMING. Tim Waterston (USA) is one the world’s fastest drummers. In January 2002, he set a speed record, playing 1,407 beats in one minute...with his feet.

  • NAILING. In October 1999, Chu-Tang-Cuong (Vietnam) drove 116 nails into a wooden board in just 11 minutes. The twist: He did it with his bare hand. (Ouch!)

  • PROPOSING. In 1976 Keith Redman (USA) asked his girlfriend Beverly to marry him. She said no, the first of 8,801 rejections, a world record. (Happy ending: In 1999 Beverly finally said “Yes” after receiving Redman’s proposals at a rate of more than one per day for 23 years.)