Read Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® Online
Authors: Michael Brunsfeld
IF YOU…
are suddenly buried by a snowstorm and don’t know which way is up or down, spit! The spit will always head down. Now you know in which direction to start digging.
IF YOU…
laid all the hot dogs Americans eat between Memorial Day and Labor Day end to end, you’d circle the globe 15 times.
IF YOU...
parachute from a helicopter at random, 7 out of 10 times you’ll hit salt water (because 70% of the Earth is covered with salt water).
IF YOU…
eat lots of red beets, your pee might turn pink.
IF YOU…
kiss under mistletoe at Christmas, that’s fine. Just don’t kiss the mistletoe itself—the berries are poisonous.
IF YOU…
and your friends meet up with a grizzly bear, stay calm and link arms with each other. This makes the bear think he’s dealing with one really big creature. Confronted with a larger creature, the bear is likely to retreat.
IF YOU…
can spit a watermelon seed 70 feet, you’re in the world-record range.
IF YOU…
have too many mosquitoes in your yard, you need some bats. One bat will eat up to 1,000 bugs per night.
IF YOU…
want to keep leaves out of your rain gutter, secure a slinky in one end, stretch it out, and attach it to the other end. You may need two slinkies if it’s a long gutter.
IF YOU…
put a raisin in a glass of champagne, it will sink to the bottom, then float to the top, then sink to the bottom, then float to the top, then sink to the…
The thickest tree on Earth: El Tule, a cypress in Mexico. It has a girth of 138 feet.
Like anyone with an e-mail address, we at the BRI get a lot of unsolicited e-mail that seems to be too good
—
or bad
—
to be true. We’ve looked into the claims made by some of them, and here’s what we’ve found. (Do any of these look familiar? We wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve received a few of them yourself.)
From: | |
To: | |
Subject: | Fwd: Breasts linked to men’s health |
This is not a joke: Ogling women’s breasts is good for a man’s health and can add years to his life, experts have discovered. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, “Just 10 minutes of staring at the charms of a well-endowed female is roughly equivalent to a 30-minute aerobics work-out,” declared gerontologist Dr. Karen Weatherby.
THE ORIGIN:
The e-mail appeared in March 2000, not long after the
Weekly World News
tabloid ran an article making a similar claim.
THE TRUTH:
It is a joke—the
New England Journal of Medicine
never published such a study, and if “Dr. Karen Weatherby” exists at all, she’s never had anything published in a medical journal.
From: | Concerned neighbors |
To: | My friends |
Subject: | Missing 5-year-old |
Five-year-old Kelsey Brooke Jones has been missing from her home in southern Minnesota since 4:00 p.m. on October 11, 1999. Please help find her by forwarding this e-mail—and the picture of Kelsey that’s attached—to everyone you know.
THE ORIGIN:
This e-mail, which originated in southern Minnesota some time after 4:00 p.m. on October 11, 1999, is believed to have been forwarded to millions of people since then.
Count ‘em yourself: Every day an adult body produces 300 billion new cells.
THE TRUTH:
Kelsey really did “disappear” on October 11—she went a few doors down to a neighbor’s apartment to play while her mother was taking a nap, and was still playing there when her mother woke up. Mom called the police before checking with the neighbors; officers found Kelsey a few minutes later when they started knocking on doors.
Because Kelsey was never really missing, no missing child report was ever filed. No matter—by then someone had already sent out the first e-mail, and it has been circulating ever since. Apparently, the picture attached to the e-mail isn’t even Kelsey… which means that millions of e-mail recipients all over the country may be keeping an eye out for a girl who never disappeared, using a picture that isn’t even her.
From: | |
To: | |
Subject: | Fwd: Spiked pay phones |
Hello, my name is Tina Strongman and I work at a police station, as a phone operator for 911.… It seems that a new form of gang initiation is to go find as many pay phones as possible and put a mixture of LSD and strychnine onto the buttons. This mixture is deadly to the human touch, and apparently, this has killed some people.… Please be careful if you are using a pay phone anywhere. You may want to wipe it off, or just not use one at all.
THE ORIGIN:
The e-mail began circulating in April 1999, following months of rumors that HIV-infected drug users were hiding contaminated needles in pay phone coin-return slots. The pay phone rumors were so pervasive that the Centers for Disease Control issued an official press release debunking them.
THE TRUTH:
The LSD–payphone e-mail is an April Fools’ joke that draws its inspiration from a number of classic urban legends, including children’s wash-off tattoos that are spiked with LSD; gangs that initiate new members by murdering the occupants of vehicles that flash their bright headlights; and AIDS-infected needles hidden in gas pump handles, movie theater seat cushions, and other seemingly innocuous places.
Take a letter: Once you file something, there’s a 98% chance you’ll never look at it again.
Star Trek
is so integrated into our culture that the word “Trekkie” is now in the dictionary. And there’s no more important aspect of Trek culture than
Star Trek
conventions. We spoke with
Trek
expert Richard Arnold, of Creation Entertainment, the biggest
Trek
convention organizers, to get the story of how they started.
The vast
Star Trek
empire thrives today, yet back in 1966 the original TV series never did better than 52nd place in the ratings and barely clawed its way through its third season before it was cancelled. After the show’s final episode in 1969, the cast and production crew disbanded, never expecting to work together again.
Two years later, Paramount syndicated the series and allowed stations to broadcast it cheaply in order to recoup part of their investment. Stations typically ran it every weekday at dinnertime, and before they knew it devoted watchers were tuning in religiously. Casual viewers also watched, giving the show a much broader audience than it had had in primetime.
Fans wanted more, but Paramount wasn’t about to risk another flop by making new episodes. So people had to settle for the next best thing: hearing
Star Trek
creator Gene Roddenberry speak about it. Soon, Roddenberry was swimming in invitations for speaking engagements at colleges and science fiction conventions.
Sci-fi conventions had been around since the 1930s, but they focused on books, not movies or television. In fact, the purist organizers of the big sci-fi conventions condemned made-for-TV science fiction as a perversion of the genre. But the droves of sci-fi buffs who packed these conventions had adored Roddenberry’s work ever since he previewed the
Star Trek’s
pilot episode “The Cage” at the sci-fi convention WorldCon in 1966 to an explosion of cheers.
The more
Star Trek
people wanted, the more resistant organizers became. Finally, their patience ran out. In 1971 at Sci-fi Con, the committee in charge sent a clear message to
Star Trek
fans: “If you want
Star Trek,
put on your own conventions; television is not welcome here.”
They must be dreaming: Scientists say the higher your I.Q., the more you dream.
There had never been a convention for only one show before, so the committee thought they were putting a stop to the
Star Trek
madness. But it was a massive blunder: without Roddenberry on the bill, audiences dwindled. Still, Roddenberry was reluctant to put together a convention, so
Star Trek
actors Al Schuster and Joan Winston together with a group of devoted fans decided to do it. The world’s first Trek Con was set to take place at New York City’s Stadtler Hilton Hotel in January 1972. Roddenberry was to be the keynote speaker and a few actors who had had bit parts were scheduled to make appearances.
Schuster and Winston guessed that maybe 400 fans would show up; a capacity crowd of 800 was a pipe dream. But when convention day arrived, so did 4,000 rabid
Star Trek
fans, who crowded in and around the packed hotel, among them legendary sci-fi author Isaac Asimov (a huge fan). Even NASA sent representatives.
Today, a Trekkie can buy almost anything with a
Star Trek
logo on it in the “dealers’ room,” but in the early days only a few wares were available: T-shirts (two different designs), homemade models, and bumper stickers with phrases like “My other car is a starship” and the infamous “Beam me up, Scotty!”
Some Trekkies showed up to the first convention in full homemade Vulcan or Klingon garb. The person with the best outfit was one of the organizers, Al Schuster, who enlisted the show’s head makeup artist to transform him into a Klingon. Once convention organizers realized that fans had no shame about dressing up as their favorite characters, they decided to encourage them by organizing fashion shows and awarding prizes for best costume—human or alien.
Not everyone liked wearing a costume, though. Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock, the show’s most popular character, was reluctant to appear at conventions because he didn’t want to be typecast. He even wrote a book entitled I Am
Not Spock.
At his first convention in 1973, his presence caused such chaos that he had to be rushed out by an army of security guards. He later came to embrace his popularity, however, and 20 years later wrote another book: I AM
Spock.
Nine out of ten extinct species are…er…were birds.
The other actors were in great demand as well, and none more than Captain James T. Kirk—William Shatner—but Shatner didn’t agree to appear at a convention until 1976. When the time came to go onstage, Shatner was a nervous wreck, says Trek Con organizer Richard Arnold: “I was sort of babysitting him before he went on—for a man who doesn’t smoke or drink, he had a cigarette and a drink in each hand.” He recovered, then blew the audience away with his over-the-top energy.
But Shatner later turned from fan favorite to hated villain with three little words. When he hosted
Saturday Night Live
in 1986, writers wanted to lampoon Trek conventions in a skit, which ended with an exasperated plea from Shatner: “Get a life!” Shatner was apprehensive about doing the skit, but the people at SNL assured him it was all in good fun.
Right before he went on, Shatner remarked: “I hope
Star Trek
fans have a sense of humor, because if not I’m going to be in big trouble.” They didn’t. According to Arnold, “Some fans are still upset about it to this day because the skit was dead-on. It’s true: there are fans who live in their parents’ basements and never go out. These people live for the show.”
Since the first convention, Trek Cons have grown in frequency and popularity. In fact, it was the popularity of the conventions that convinced Paramount to resurrect
Star Trek
as a movie in 1979. By the mid-70s, Trek conventions were regularly drawing 20,000 people. Chicago’s 1975 Trek Con drew a whopping 30,000 Trekkies! Today, every major city has an annual convention; many have several. On an average weekend, there are 10 to 20 Trek conventions taking place in the North America and Europe. Admission prices range from just a few dollars to over $1,000 for front-row seating.
The average office chair with wheels will travel over 8 miles this year.
Astronomical attendance and high ticket prices translate to big bucks for the actors. They used to speak for $500 or less—sometimes even for free. Now big guns like Shatner, Nimoy, and
The Next Generation’s
Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard) and Brent Spiner (Data) pocket as much as $50,000 per appearance. Autographs used to be free; today fans can count on forking over $5 to $30. Shatner and Nimoy charge $50 to $100 for a signature. Many former
Star Trek
actors make a very nice living by appearing at 30-plus conventions per year at $10,000 a pop.