Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader (26 page)

“Consider the similarities:
Cosmos Patrol
takes place in the 23rd century aboard a large galaxy-cruising spaceship called the
Red Adventurer
, on a long-term mission of exploration on behalf of the Commonwealth of Independent Star Systems. Both ships encounter strange alien beings and bizarre celestial phenomena week after week. Both ships boast a dashing commander at their helm, with an overly intellectual first officer by his side. And both shows feature cheap special effects and odd velour uniforms.

“Like much of Russian pop culture, the show oozes with sentimentality, up to and including tearful folk songs and lengthy toasts to the Intergalactic Brotherhood of life forms. And when Comrade Commander faces a difficult decision, he sometimes asks for guidance from the bust of Lenin in the ship’s wardroom. The show is such a clone of
Star Trek
that there is even a character called Ensign Chekhov, who provides comic relief with his tall tales, or
vranyo
, as the Russians call them. In about every other episode, he lets it rip with this surefire comedy catchphrase: ‘I’d rather eat a Kvassian bivalve—and I have!’”

—
Stim.com

*        *        *

“I wouldn’t know a space-time continuum or warp-core breach if they got into bed with me.”

—
Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard on
Star Trek: the Next Generation
)

The north pole of Uranus is dark for 42 years at a time. (Ha ha—we said “Uranus”!)

FOUNDING FATHERS

You already know the names—here are the people behind them
.

C
HARLES GULDEN

Gulden ran a spice company in New York City in the 1860s. At the time, many spice merchants only offered mustard in a dry, white, very strong powder that had to be mixed with water. Gulden had an idea: He mixed a variety of mustard powders with mustard seed, other spices, and aged vinegar, then combined all of them (along with turmeric, for color) with water and sold the concoction in glass jars. This was the first prepared yellow mustard ever made. Gulden’s Mustard went national in 1875 and is still one of the bestselling condiments in the United States.

HERMAN LAY

In 1932, 24-year-old Herman Lay, a failed ice-cream salesman, took a job with Barrett Food Company, an Atlanta potato-chip maker. He drove all over the South selling cases of potato chips to stores out of the trunk of his car. He did so well that in 1938 he bought the Barrett company and changed its name to the HW Lay Company. But potato chips had to be made and sold locally—they got broken in shipping. And that’s how Lay’s grew: It bought up smaller potato-chip processors all over the country. By the 1950s, Lay’s had became the top-selling brand of potato chips in the world.

JOSHUA VICK

Lunsford Richardson was a pharmacist in Selma, North Carolina, in the early 1880s. One night his son came down with a bad cold. Back then, the most common cold remedy was to spread a mustard paste on the chest. The strong aroma was thought to open up air passages, but it also caused skin to break out into painful blisters. Trying to find a way to reduce the blisters, Richardson experimented with several substances—unsuccessfully—until he combined petroleum jelly, menthol, nutmeg, cedar, and eucalyptus oils. That mixture worked. First marketed as Richard’s Croup and Pneumonia Salve, it flopped. So he renamed it Vick’s Magic Croup Salve after his brother-in-law, Joshua Vick, a popular town doctor. (Besides, “Vick’s” fit better on the tiny blue jars). The product became known as Richard-Vick’s VapoRub in 1908. It was purchased by Proctor and Gamble and became available nationwide in 1985.

Uranus is 31,763 miles in diameter. (Ha ha! We said it again!)

JACK RUSSELL

Russell (1795–1883), an Oxford divinity student and avid hunter known as the Sporting Parson, dreamed of the perfect fox-hunting dog: compact like a terrier but aggressive enough to root foxes out of their small holes. One day he saw a milkman walking a small dog that looked like the one he’d imagined. Russell bought the dog (named “Trump”) on the spot and went into business breeding them for fox hunting. As a result, any small hunting terrier came to be known as a “Jack Russell Terrier” or a “Parson Russell Terrier.”

RAY DOLBY

Dolby, born in Portland, Oregon, was a UN advisor in India in the 1960s. But technology, not diplomacy, was his dream. He wanted to improve the sound of recorded music and films, which hissed very loudly in those days. So in 1965 he founded Dolby Labs in England, and soon figured out a way to reduce the noise on magnetic tapes, a discovery that helped usher in the cassette era of the 1970s. In 1976 Dolby took his labs to San Francisco and sold his “Dolby Noise Reduction” technology to the film industry, revolutionizing that medium, too. In all, Dolby holds more than 50 U.S. patents.

SEBASTIAN S. KRESGE

In 1899 this Pennsylvania native purchased two five-and-dime stores in Detroit, Michigan. By 1912 the SS Kresge Company had 85 stores in the Midwest. In his day, the wealthy Kresge was a well-known philanthropist, but today we know him only by his last initial. After Kresge retired in 1959, a former newspaper reporter named Harry Cunningham took over the company and wanted to expand the dime stores into larger markets, or “marts.” He opened the first one in Detroit in 1962. Believing that “Kresge-mart” was too hard to pronounce, Cunningham shortened it to Kmart.

First person to make a solo flight from Hawaii to the mainland: Amelia Earhart.

OL’ JAY’S BRAINTEASERS

Supersleuth and BRI stalwart Jay Newman has come up with another batch of his simple yet compelling puzzles. Answers are on
page 519
.

1. BRIGHT THINKING

Uncle John gave Amy this challenge: “In the hallway there are three light switches,” he said. “And in the library there are three lamps. Each switch corresponds to one of the lamps. You may enter the library only once—the lamps must be turned off when you do. At no time until you enter can you open the door to see into the library. Your job is to figure out which switch corresponds to which lamp.”

“Easy,” said Amy.

How did she do it?

2. MYSTERY JOB

Brian works at a place with thousands of products, some of them very expensive. People take his products without paying for them—as many as they can carry—and then just walk out. All that Brian requests of his customers is that they keep their mouths shut.

Where does Brian work?

3. SIDE TO SIDE

Uncle John stood on one side of a river; his dog, Porter, stood on the opposite side. “Come here, Porter!” said Uncle John. Although there were no boats or bridges, Porter crossed the river without getting wet. How?

4. SPECIAL NUMBER

Math usually stumps Thom, but when Uncle John showed him this number, he knew right away what makes it unique. Do you?

8,549,176,320

5. TIME PIECES

“Everyone knows that the sundial is the timepiece with the fewest moving parts,” Jay told Julia. “Do you know what timepiece has the
most
moving parts?” She did. Do you?

6. WORD PLAY

“Weird Nate sent me this list of words,” said Uncle John. “He says there’s something unusual about them. But what?” Ol’ Jay figured it out. Can you?

revive, banana, grammar, voodoo, assess, potato, dresser, uneven

Sliced bread was banned during WWII. (The slicers were melted down for the war effort.)

HIGH ANXIETY

We’ve all had those moments—when something completely unexpected scares the c**p out of us. It gives us something to laugh about…later
.

H
E GOT TOO HIGH

A student from the Gloucestershire College of Arts and Technology in Cheltenham, England, woke up one morning in May 2006…and found himself 100 feet up in a pine tree. He had no idea how he got there, but apparently he’d climbed the tree the night before while drunk (and barefoot). Luckily, he had his cell phone with him. It took firefighters two hours to get him down. “He was a bit quiet when he came down,” officer Nigel Limbrick told
The Sun
, “and a bit embarrassed.”

THE FUR WAS FLYING

The pilot of a passenger plane en route from Brussels to Vienna had to turn the plane around and return to Brussels after he was attacked by a cat. The cat apparently escaped its travel bag in the cabin (small pets are allowed as carry-ons), became agitated, and ran into the cockpit when a flight attendant opened the door. Once inside, it “ran wild,” according to the crew, attacking the pilot and leaving multiple scratches on his arms. A spokeswoman for the airline said the pilot did the right thing in returning to Brussels, noting that the cat took a long time to capture and could have hit one of the delicate instruments in the cockpit. She also said there were unconfirmed reports that the cat had been “kicked by someone in business class.”

NICE HEADLIGHTS

In 2004 Dave Alsop was driving through the West Midland Safari Park in Worcestershire, England, when he stopped to take a picture of two mating rhinoceroses. The next thing he knew, the male rhino, who at more than 4,000 pounds weighed considerably more than Alsop’s Renault, was trying to mount the car. From the side. “He sidled up against us,” Alsop said. “Suddenly he’s banging away at the car and it’s rocking like hell.” Alsop sped away…with the rhino in hot pursuit.

An octopus lays about 100,000 eggs at a time.

BEAR-LY SURVIVED

In June 2006, Debbie Yates was getting ready for work in her Nevada City, California, home when she heard noises coming from her kitchen. She assumed it was her cats playing. It wasn’t. “I came around the corner and into the kitchen,” she told reporters, “and instead of seeing cats, I saw a big, brown bear coming in through the kitchen window.” Fortunately, the bear was too big to get through the window, and ran away when Yates screamed.

PLANES ON A PORSCHE

In June 2005, a German man got permission to drive his Porsche on the runway at a small seldom-used airport in the town of Bitburg. The man was traveling at about 100 mph when a small private plane landed on the roof of the car. The startled driver slammed on his brakes, which sent the plane crashing onto the tarmac. Both vehicles were badly damaged, but the pilot and the driver were fine. “They probably couldn’t have done it that well if they had tried,” said local policeman Klaus Schnarrbach. The pilot was cited for making an unscheduled landing (on a car).

RAINING CATS AND…

A man in the Polish town of Sosnowiec was walking down a street in July 2006, when he heard a noise above his head. He looked up and saw a Saint Bernard falling from the sky. That was the last thing he saw before the dog fell on top of him. The 110-pound canine, named Oskar, had been pushed out of a second-story window by its drunk owner. Luckily, both man and dog were unhurt. A police spokesman said that “the dog had a soft landing because it fell on a man.” He added, however, that the man was “in a psychological state of shock.”

NOT
AN URBAN LEGEND

In 1999 a woman in England went to her doctor after having headaches for three sleepless nights, accompanied by “a strange noise” in her right ear. The doctor examined her ear—and told her there was a spider “snuggled up right against her eardrum.” He removed the spider with a syringe, and there was no harm to the woman. But, according to Reuters, “the doctor raised an unsavory possibility—that the arachnid was a female intent on laying eggs.”

Bob Hope was jailed as a youth for stealing tennis balls.

If you’re like Uncle John, over the years you’ve collected a lot of stuff—photos, records, clothing, comic books—maybe even an old guitar. Here’s a guide to preserving your precious keepsakes
.

W
HAT YOU’LL NEED

Here are the basic supplies you’ll need to protect collectibles and keep them safe for years to come.

• Cotton gloves.
Many of the things you want to protect can be damaged by the oils, acids, and dirt on your fingers. Get into the habit of wearing white gloves when handling your treasures.

• A can of compressed air.
Dust can be damaging, but so can wiping it off. Use compressed air to blow the dust away.

• “Archival quality” packing and storage materials.
Do you keep your old papers and photographs in manila envelopes? Is the family silverware rolled in saran wrap? Is everything packed away in cardboard boxes? You may be doing more harm than good. Use “archival-quality” packing supplies that are made of acid-free paper, plastic that does not leach chemicals or other inert materials. Pack your keepsakes in the proper material, then put them in those big plastic tubs made of polyethylene or polypropylene. They’ll keep the mice and bugs away and also protect against dampness and flooding.

• A cool, dry, dark place to store your things.
Attics get too hot in summer and too cold in winter. Basements can get damp and moldy, but if you must store items there, raise the storage bins at least one foot off the floor.

PHOTOGRAPHS.
A good rule of thumb with any media: Make duplicates. Make copies of your photos, and put the originals away for safekeeping. If you store your photographs or slides in plastic sleeves, make sure the sleeves are polyester, polypropylene, or polyethylene. Don’t use PVC—it contains substances that damage photos. Photo albums are also good but again, be sure to look for archival-quality or acid-free albums. Photos can also be scanned and transferred to CDs, but there may come a day when CD players are obsolete, so it’s a good idea to put a CD/DVD player into storage, too. Then, as new recording and playing devices evolve, you can transfer your pictures to the new formats.