Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader (8 page)

—
Dave Attell

“I can bend forks with my mind, but only the ones at Denny’s. And you have to look away for a little while.”

—
Bobcat Goldthwaite

“
Frisbeetarianism
is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.”

—
George Carlin

“Did you hear they finally made a device that makes cars run 95% quieter? It fits right over her mouth.”

—
Billy Crystal

“My parents only had one argument in forty-five years. It lasted forty-three years.”

—
Cathy Ladman

“First the doctor told me the good news: I was going to have a disease named after me.”

—
Steve Martin

“I think I’m a pretty good judge of people, which is why I hate most of them.”

—
Roseanne

“It’s strange, isn’t it. You stand in the middle of a library and go ‘
aaaaagghhhh
’ and everyone just stares at you. But you do the same thing on an airplane, and everyone joins in.”

—
Tommy Cooper

“I’m against picketing…but I don’t know how to show it.”

—
Mitch Hedburg

“A study in the
Washington Post
says that women have better verbal skills than men. I just want to say to the authors of that study:
Duh
.”

—
Conan O’Brien

500 pairs of false sideburns were used in the making of
Gone With the Wind
.

HOW PAPER BECAME MONEY

Today we take it for granted that a $20 bill is worth 20 dollars. But convincing people that paper can be just as valuable as gold or silver took centuries and involved many false starts. Take this one, for example
.

S
POILS OF WAR
In 1298 a Venetian traveler named Marco Polo signed on as “gentleman commander” of a Venetian galley and led it in battle against the fleet of its rival city, Genoa.

Lucky for us, Polo lost. After he was captured and thrown into prison, he spent the next two years dictating a detailed account of his 24 years of travel in India, Africa, and China (then part of the Mongol empire ruled by Kublai Khan).

Until then, very little was known about that part of the world. Few Europeans had been to the Far East, and even fewer had written about their experiences. Polo’s memoirs changed everything.
The Travels of Marco Polo
was widely read all over Europe and is considered the most important account of the “outside” world written during the Middle Ages.

HARD TO BELIEVE

But not everyone believed it. In its day,
The Travels of Marco Polo
was also known as
Il Milióne
, or “The Million Lies,” because so many of the things that Polo described seemed preposterous to his European readers. He told of a postal system that could transport a letter 300 miles in a single day, fireproof cloth that could be cleaned by throwing it into a fire (it was made from asbestos), and baths that were heated by “stones that burn like logs” (coal).

But one of Polo’s most preposterous-seeming claims: In Kublai Khan’s empire, people traded
paper
as if it were gold.

Here’s how Polo described it:

In [the] city of Kanbalu, is the mint of the Grand Khan, who may truly be said to possess the secret of the alchemists, as he has the art of producing paper money.…When ready for use, he has it cut into pieces of money of different sizes.…The coinage of this paper money is authenticated with as much form and ceremony as if it were actually of pure gold or silver…and the act of counterfeiting it is punished as a capital offence.

Cranberry Jell-O is the only flavor that contains real fruit flavoring.

This paper currency is circulated in every part of the Grand Khan’s dominions; nor does any person, at the peril of his life, refuse to accept it in payment. All his subjects receive it without hesitation, because, wherever their business may call them, they can dispose of it again in the purchase of merchandise they have occasion for, such as pearls, jewels, gold, or silver. All his majesty’s armies are paid with this currency, which is to them of the same value as if it were gold and silver.

Paper
money? Europeans had never seen anything like it.

MADE IN CHINA

Kublai Khan’s paper currency may have been news to Europeans, but for the Chinese it was just the latest attempt to establish paper as a legitimate form of money:

• Felted paper made from animal fibers was invented in China in about 177 B.C., and less than 40 years after that, the Chinese Emperor Wu-Ti (140–87 B.C.) began to issue the first notes made from paper. They were intended only as a temporary substitute for real money—precious metals and coins—when real money was in short supply. These first bills were more like cardboard than the foldable bills we use today.

• Another emperor, Hien Tsung, issued his own notes during a copper shortage in the early 800s. These, too, were intended only as temporary substitutes, but the idea caught on. More currency was issued in the year 910; after that, paper money came to be issued on a more regular basis.

• By 1020 so many paper notes were in circulation that China became the first country to experience “paper inflation.” That’s what happens when too much money is printed: it takes more currency to buy the same goods than it used to, so the purchasing power of each individual note goes down. If enough paper money is printed, the currency eventually becomes as worthless as… paper. To counteract the inflation, government officials began spraying the bills with perfume to make them more attractive. It didn’t do any good—and neither did anything else they tried.

Finland has more islands than any other country: 179,584.

• When one issue of currency became worthless, government officials would replace it with a new issue of currency; but since they kept printing new bills, in time the new ones would become worthless too, and the cycle would repeat itself.

• By the time of the Mongol invasion in the early 13th century, China had already endured several rounds of paper inflation, but that didn’t stop the Mongols from adopting the concept of paper money and spreading it across the entire Mongol empire.

• Kublai Khan issued his own series of paper notes in 1260. These were the ones that Marco Polo encountered when he visited China. By 1290, they were worthless, too.

THE END OF THE PAPER TRAIL

Although the Chinese used paper money over the next 150 years, by 1455 they were so disillusioned with it that it disappeared altogether and did not reappear in China for another 450 years.

“The Chinese people lost all faith in paper money and became more than ever convinced of the virtues of silver,” historian Glyn Davies writes in
A History of Money, “
a conviction that lasted right up to the early part of the twentieth century.”

Turn to Part II of “How Paper Became Money” on
page 258
.

*        *        *

WISDOM THEY DON’T TEACH IN SCHOOL
(but you can learn on the Internet)

• Scratch a dog and you’ll find a permanent job.

• No one has more driving ambition than the boy who wants to buy a car.

• There are worse things than getting a call for a wrong number at 4 a.m. It could be a right number.

• Money may buy a dog; only kindness can make him wag his tail.

• The great thing about the future is that it always starts tomorrow.

• Seat belts are not as confining as wheelchairs.

• Learn from the mistakes of others. You won’t live long enough to make them all yourself.

Albert Einstein was convinced his cat suffered from depression.

PHONE PHUNNIES

Riddle: What’s the difference between a phone booth and a bathroom? (If you don’t know, please don’t use our phone booth.
)

O
VER THE HUMP
Next time you find yourself in rural India and need to phone home, don’t bother looking for a phone booth; there are none—the cost of laying telephone cable in rural areas is prohibitive. Yet there are millions of potential customers, so enterprising telecommunications companies have to be creative. Enter Shyam Telelink. The solution: They own 200 mobile phones. Every day they send the phones out into the back country… mounted on camels. Customers say the service is very user-friendly. Cost: 2 cents a call.

DIAL-A-DOLPHIN

Stressed out and stuck in traffic with only your cell phone to keep you company? Call a dolphin. As you listen to their underwater clicks and whistles, your stress will disappear. At least that’s what scientists at Ireland’s Dolphin and Wildlife Foundation hope will happen once they’ve installed underwater microphones in the Shannon estuary, where dolphins reside year round. They’re working with telecom giant Vodaphone to make it possible for cell phone users worldwide to “reach out and touch” the dolphins.

Some kinks still need to be worked out, though—dolphins use a wide frequency band to communicate…most of which is beyond the human range of hearing.

CALL ME STUPID

Michael LaRock, a thief who had been on the run for over a year, called the police in Ticonderoga, New York, to boast that he would never be caught. Apparently it didn’t occur to him that the police might have caller I.D. The cops tracked the call to Auburn, Georgia, and quickly contacted the local police. While Officer Dan Charlton in New York was talking to LaRock on the phone, he heard the doorbell ring in the background. The next thing he heard was the Georgia police coming through the door to arrest the thief…right in his own home.

Most widely eaten fish in the world: herring.

SPACE, INC.

To most people, the stars represent the infinite cosmos. To some advertisers, they represent infinite opportunity—or rather, product placement heaven
.

L
OOK! UP IN THE SKY!
Companies have been trying to commercialize space since the 1960s. But they took one giant step in 1993 when a Georgia-based company called Space Marketing, Inc. floated the idea of sending mile-long billboards into orbit. The Mylar billboards were designed to stay aloft for 30 days and project images half the size of a full moon to potential customers down on Earth. Fortunately, it never happened. Congress outlawed the billboards later that year, as Massachusetts Congressman Edward Markey raised the specter of every sunrise and sunset beaming down “the logo of Coke or G.M. or the Marlboro man, turning our morning and evening skies into the moral equivalent of the side of a bus.”

While our skies seem safe from advertising for the moment, they may not stay that way. Federal regulations prohibit federal employees—astronauts included—from endorsing products, but American companies have found creative ways to finesse their own nation’s rules. And the cash-poor Russians have no such inhibitions. In fact, they’ve thrown the doors wide open to advertisers in order to help fund their space ventures. A brief chronology:

FISHER SPACE PEN (1968)
Fisher was trying to build a better ballpoint when it invented a cartridge that used pressurized nitrogen instead of gravity to feed ink to the pen point. Two years later, NASA thought the pens would be perfect for taking notes in zero gravity and sent some along on the Apollo 7 mission. The pens, renamed AG-7 Space Pens, became standard equipment on both American and Russian flights. Seizing a marketing opportunity, in 1998 Fisher peddled their pens during a live telecast from the Russian space station Mir to home shopping network QVC.

THE COKE/PEPSI
CHALLENGER
(1985)
Among the many scientific experiments carried out on 1985’s STS-51F
Challenger
mission was one NASA called the Carbonated Beverage Dispenser Evaluation (CBDE). In this carefully controlled trial, Coca-Cola and Pepsi each provided specially designed cans to deliver their beverages to thirsty astronauts. (The crew reported that without gravity or refrigeration, neither was very good.)

Antarctica is the only continent that does not have land areas below sea level.

SLINKY SLINKS ONTO SPACE SHUTTLE (1985)
Another experiment was conducted on the
Challenger
to show how a Slinky would behave in low-gravity conditions. Astronauts were filmed playing with the toys for an “educational” video.

GOT MILKSKI? (1997)
Space vehicles carry milk in powdered form—they can’t spare the energy for refrigeration. So what better way to show off the long shelf life of Israel’s Tnuva Milk than to deliver it fresh to the space travelers’ door? They spent $450,000 to fly their product to the Mir space station and film cosmonauts gulping it down, and then used the footage for a commercial on Israeli television.

PIE IN THE SKY (1999)
Pizza Hut reportedly paid the Russians $1 million to paint a 30-foot version of its logo on the side of a Russian Proton rocket that was carrying a crew to the International Space Station (ISS). Then, piggybacking on a Russian cargo flight, Pizza Hut delivered a 15-inch salami and cheese pizza.

FRAMED! (2000)
Radio Shack flew a “talking” picture frame to the ISS as a Father’s Day gift for Commander Yuri Usachev. It held a picture of his 12-year-old daughter, Evgenia, and played this message: “Hey Dad, we are wishing you good fortune and success in your job and good relationships with the crew.” A TV commercial featuring space-suited cosmonauts floating in through a hatch to deliver the gift to Usachev in a Radio Shack shopping bag debuted on American television on May 27, 2001.