• A 21-flush salute to our out-house outhouse writers—Malcolm, Jahnna, Jef Ef, Kyle, Ernest “No More Doughnuts” Cheek, Jack, Erin, Gideon, and Angie, whose feet adorn almost every page.
• To our fabulous production staff—John G., Jeff A., Jennifer’s terrific team of conscientious copyeditors, Rain, whom we will miss, Michael B., who’s always got us covered, and Julia, whose managing prowess actually makes this book possible—thanks for 522 pages worth of hard work and dedication.
• To Allen, Sydney, JoAnn, and our friends at Banta, thank you for the support.
• To Porter the Wonder Dog. You’re simply the best dog…ever.
And finally, thank you, our faithful readers. Every day we get letters telling us how much our books mean to you. Well, you mean just as much to us. We’re all just one big happy family keeping the bathroom reading movement alive. It brings a tear to my eye. (I have to go now, before I short out my computer.)
Keep on reading. And as always,
Go with the Flow!
Uncle John and the BRI Staff
P.S. Did we mention our Web site? It’s www.bathroomreader.com
It’s not a typo: It’s www.bathroomreader.com
YOU’RE MY INSPIRATION
It’s always interesting to find out where the architects of pop culture get their ideas. These may surprise you.
CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY. In the 1920s, England’s two biggest chocolate makers, Cadbury and Rowntree, tried to steal trade secrets by sending spies into each others’ factories, posed as employees. Result: both companies became highly protective of their chocolate-making process. When Roald Dahl was 13, he worked as a taste-tester at Cadbury. The secretive policies and the giant, elaborate machines inspired the future author to write his book about chocolatier Willy Wonka.
MARLBORO MAN. Using a cowboy to pitch the cigarette brand was inspired when ad execs saw a 1949 Life magazine photo—a close-up of a weather-worn Texas rancher named Clarence Hailey Long, who wore a cowboy hat and had a cigarette in his mouth.
NAPOLEON DYNAMITE. Elvis Costello used it as a pseudonym on his 1986 album Blood and Chocolate. Scriptwriter Jeremy Coon met a street person in New York who said his name was Napoleon Dynamite. Coon liked the name, and unaware of the Costello connection, used it for the lead character in his movie.
CHARLIE THE TUNA. The Leo Burnett Agency created Charlie for StarKist Tuna in 1961. Ad writer Tom Rogers based him on a beatnik friend of his (that’s why he wears a beret) who wanted to be respected for his “good taste.”
THE ODD COUPLE. In 1962 TV writer Danny Simon got divorced and moved in with another divorced man. Simon was a neat freak, while his friend was a slob. Simon’s brother, playwright Neil Simon, turned the situation into The Odd Couple. (Neil says Danny inspired at least nine other characters in his plays.)
“I DON’T GET NO RESPECT.” After seeing The Godfather in 1972, comedian Rodney Dangerfield noticed that all the characters did the bidding of Don Corleone out of respect. Dangerfield just flipped the concept.
Psycho? Alfred Hitchcock had an extreme fear of eggs.
A LAZY LUMP OF CHEESE
BRI member Richard Staples sent us these real responses from Russian high school kids applying to come to America on a foreign-exchange program.
Tell us about yourself:
“I’d like to be rich and famous. But it can hardly come true, I’m lazy and talentless.”
“I don’t want to write about my friends because I am afraid to fall over.”
“I love to eat ice cream, apples, chocolate and my mother’s plow.”
“I have a medium body (not too fat and not weedy).”
“In my free time I like to write poems. They are not very nice but they are mental.”
“My father reckons that I’m just a lazy lump of cheese.”
“And then I will have a good job and I’ll be happy and blah blah blah.”
Tell us about your family:
“People often ask me, my appearance is like mother’s or father’s one. I can say proudly I’m hybrid.”
“I felt safe, as safe as only can be when you are falling off a hill with a bicycle and a father.”
Tell us about your town:
“My town is windy and full of stones.”
“In the suburbs of our town we have stud factory.”
Do you have any pets?
“I visit my dog’s club. His name is Danil. He is an American Staff-teryer. I am proud of him because he is an American.”
“Most of all I prefer to play with my cat and change his hairstyle in winter.”
“My cat is a member of my family. I have special relations with her.”
Tell us about your school:
“We had to learn stupid poems in English about cows and pigs.”
“Exact sciences reach my brain with difficulty.”
Anything else to tell us?
“Free cheese only in mouse-catching machine.”
“Though my mother told me it was only a toy, I could not forgive the silence of the teddy bear.”
The degree sign (°) is an ancient symbol representing the sun.
FIRSTS
Q: What does everything in the world have in common? A: There was a first one.
First brewery in North America: opened in New Amsterdam (Manhattan) in 1612.
First professional sports organization in the United States: the Maryland Jockey Club, founded in 1743.
First American to fly in a hot air balloon: Edward Warren (1784).
First American cookbook: American Cookery, published by Amelia Simmons in 1796.
First refrigerator: invented by Thomas Moore in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1803.
First flea circus performance: took place in New York City in 1835.
First American novel to sell a million copies: Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852).
First drive-in movie theater: opened in Camden, New Jersey, in 1933. (Picture shown: Wives Beware, starring Adolphe Menjou.)
First female celebrity to wear pants in public: Actress Sarah Bernhardt was photographed wearing men’s trousers in 1876.
First blood transfusion: June 1667, by Jean-Baptiste Denys, a French doctor, to a 15-year-old boy. (He got lamb’s blood.)
First electric hand drill: invented by Wilhelm Fein of Norwell, Massachusetts, in 1895.
First tank: built in 1916 and nicknamed “Little Willie,” it could only go 2 mph and never saw duty in battle.
First drink of Kool-Aid: taken by chemist Edwin Perkins of Hastings, Nebraska, in 1927.
World’s first flight attendant: Ellen Church, hired in 1930. (She wanted to be a pilot.)
First coast-to-coast direct-dial phone call: made from Englewood, New Jersey, to Alameda, California, in 1951.
First Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader: went to press in 1988.
Barn owls snore.
BATHROOM NAMES
The origins of some names you can see from where you’re sitting.
KOHLER. Named after John Michael Kohler, an Austrian immigrant who started a steel products company in Wisconsin in 1873. In 1883 he applied enamel to one of his products, a horse trough, creating the company’s first bathtub.
PRICE PFISTER. Founded in Los Angeles in 1910 by Emil Price and William Pfister. Their first plumbing product: a garden faucet. Over the decades they added indoor faucets, valves, and shower-heads. (During World War II they made hand grenade shells.)
ELJER. In 1907 Raymond Elmer Crane and his cousin, Oscar Jerome Backus, bought an old dinnerware plant in West Virginia, where they made some of the earliest vitreous china toilet tanks. The name combines the “El” in Elmer and the “Jer” in Jerome.
DELTA. Owned by Masco Screw Corporation, which was founded in Detroit in 1929 by Armenian immigrant Alex Manoogian. In 1952 an inventor brought Manoogian his latest product—a one-handled faucet with a ball-valve to mix the hot and cold water. But it leaked. Manoogian bought the rights, perfected the valve, and r
eleased the “Delta” faucet, so named because the triangle-shaped cam resembled the Greek letter delta [Ø].
HANSGROHE. Named after Hans Grohe, who founded the plumbing products company in Shiltach, Germany, in 1901. Hansgrohe’s innovations include the first handheld showerhead (1928) and the Selecta adjustable showerhead (1956). Today they’re the world’s largest showerhead supplier. (Not to be confused with Grohe, another German company, which was started by Friedrich Grohe in 1936 and makes futuristic-looking faucet sets.)
AMERICAN-STANDARD. It comes from two companies: the American Radiator Company, founded in 1872, and the Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company, founded in 1875. They merged in 1929 to become the American Radiator and Standard Sanitary Corporation. In 1968 they changed it to “American-Standard.”
Good luck! It’s easier to find gold than to win the lottery.
OOPS!
Everybody enjoys reading about somebody else’s blunders. So go ahead and feel superior for a few minutes.
SMART CAR…DUMB TRUCK “A truck driver hit a Smart car on a motorway then drove for two miles with the tiny vehicle wedged to the front of his HGV—and did not know it was there. Trucker Klaus Buergermeister only stopped when he was flagged down by police, allowing terrified driver Andreas Bolga, 48, to escape. Klaus, 53, said he had only felt a slight bump and added: ‘I could not believe it when I got out and saw there was a car stuck on the front of my truck.’”
—The Express (UK)
(P)OOPS
“A police sniffer dog caused a political stink in South Africa’s parliament after leaving its excrement under of the seat of a prominent opposition leader. The dog feces found under the bench of Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi provoked outrage among politicians as some believed it was left there as an insult. One member of parliament demanded a formal apology from the Speaker of Parliament. But a police spokesman said it amounted to a simple call of nature. ‘It was one of our police dogs we use to sweep the premises,’ said Inspector Dennis Adriao. ‘The handler did try to clean it up but missed some of it. Obviously, we have apologized for any embarrassment caused.’”
—Reuters
OOH, THAT STINGS
“A Pasadena, Texas, man who blasted a wasp’s nest with a 12-gauge shotgun was jailed after an errant pellet injured a 5-year-old boy in a nearby apartment. Police Sgt. J. M. Baird said Romeo Gonzalez, 18, fired the gun to break up the nest which was hanging from a tree outside his second-floor apartment. The pellet entered a first-floor apartment and struck David Marban in the thigh. The boy was hospitalized but is expected to recover.”
—CBS News
Technically speaking, coffee is a fruit juice.
ONE OF THESE DAYS, ARNOLD, POW…
“Joe Scarborough, a political commentator for MSNBC, failed to check his facts when he recently reported that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had advocated destroying the moon. Citing a British newspaper, Scarborough, a former congressman, quoted Schwarzenegger as saying: ‘If we get rid of the moon, women—those menstrual cycles are governed by the moon—will not get PMS. They will stop bitching and whining.’
“Scarborough then chided Schwarzenegger for insensitivity, saying: ‘I don’t know how it works in Austria, but let me tell you something, friend. Jokes about such matters are not laughing subjects to women in America.’ It turned out, however, that the remarks Scarborough attributed to the Austrian-born governor were actually made by a Schwarzenegger impersonator who regularly appears on the Howard Stern radio show. Eleven days later, Scarborough apologized to viewers and Schwarzenegger for ‘my terrible mistake.’”
—Reuters
WHAT’S COOKING?
“A married couple in Howard, Wisconsin, ducked behind a refrigerator when bullets began exploding in their oven. Police said the husband hid the ammunition and three handguns in the oven before the couple went on vacation out of fear that they would be stolen if someone broke into the house. Upon returning, the wife turned on the oven.”
—USA Today
BRAZIL NUTS
“A gang of prisoners in a Brazilian jail spent months digging a tunnel in a bid for freedom. But they emerged from the tunnel’s end inside the prison yard. The underground escape route, which had reportedly taken the 67 men months to complete, ended just one foot short of the main perimeter wall. Prison guards promptly took the crestfallen prisoners back to their cells, Journal da Globo reported last week. ‘They were so frustrated and we could not hold back our laughter, they were so dumb,’ a guard told the newspaper.”
—The Australian
Bill Clinton is the most widely traveled president in U.S. history.
CHICKEN NUGGETS
We pecked around our library and laid this egg—a page of chicken trivia.
• There are over 150 varieties of domestic chickens. The most common egg-layers are White Leghorns and Golden Comets. The most common poultry varieties are Cornish Cross and Plymouth Rocks.
• Chickens and turkeys can cross-breed. The result is called a turken.
• The short-term egg-laying record was set in 1967 by a White Leghorn in Sri Lanka. She laid 17 eggs in six hours.
• If there’s no rooster in a flock of chickens, one hen will stop laying eggs and crow, assuming the role of protector.
• The chicken is the closest living relative of Tyrannosaurus rex.
• The amount of waste a chicken generates in its lifetime could power a 100-watt light bulb for five hours.
• Chickens are native to Asia. They were spread around the world as an easy food source, and were first brought to North America by Christopher Columbus.
• World record: In 1930 a chicken in New Zealand laid 361 eggs in 364 days.
• Typically, it takes a hen 24 to 26 hours to lay an egg, which hatches in 21 days.
• A chicken’s comb (the decorative head plumage) has a practical function: it keeps the bird cool. There are eight varieties: buttercup, pea, strawberry, V-shaped, silkis, cushion, rose, and single.
• Chickens can’t swallow while they are upside down.
• If a chicken has a white earlobe, its eggs will be white. If it’s earlobe is red, the eggs will be brown-shelled. An exception: Arucana chickens can lay green, pink, and blue eggs.
• Worldwide, chickens outnumber humans.
• World’s largest chicken egg: 16 ounces, laid by a New Jersey White Leghorn in 1956.
• Chickens have 24 distinct cries to communicate to one another, including separate alarm calls depending on what kind of predator is near.
Are you chicken when it comes to chickens? Then you have alektorophobia.
LIFE IN 1902
It’s amazing how much things have changed in 100 years.
Average life expectancy in the United States: 46
Fourteen percent of American homes had a bathtub. Eight percent had a telephone.
Cost of a three-minute phone call from Denver to New York City: $11
There were 8,000 cars in the United States and 144 miles of paved road on which to travel.
Marijuana, heroin, and morphine were all legal and available over the counter at any drugstore.
Speed limit in most cities: 10 mph
Mississippi, Iowa, Tennessee, and Alabama all had larger populations than California.
Average hourly wage in the United States: 22 cents (the average worker made between $200 and $400 a year)
Population of Las Vegas: 30
Ninety percent of doctors in the United States hadn’t attended college.
Leading causes of death in the United States: pneumonia, influenza, tuberculosis, heart disease, diarrhea, and stroke.
Crossword puzzles, canned beer, and iced tea hadn’t been invented yet.
Only six percent of American adults were high school graduates. Ten percent of adults were illiterate.
There were 230 reported murders in the United States.
Ninety-five percent of all births took place at home.
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Sugar cost 4¢ a pound, coffee was 15¢ a pound, and eggs were 14¢ per dozen.
Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Hawaii, and Alaska were not yet states.
Most women washed their hair once a month and used egg yolks or borax for shampoo.
Eighteen percent of American homes had a full-time servant.
The Eiffel Tower was the tallest structure in the world.
Charles Dickens’s character Tiny Tim was originally called Small Sam.
THEY ARE WHAT YOU EAT
You eat these products and drink a few of them, too. But how much do you know about the people they’re named for?
MRS. PAUL
In 1946 power plant worker Edward Piszek started selling deviled crab cakes in a local Philadelphia bar to earn money while the plant was on strike. “One Friday I prepared 172 and we only sold 50,” he recalled later. “There was a freezer in the back of the bar, so we threw ’em in there. It was either that or the trash can.” A week later the frozen crab cakes still tasted fine, so Piszek and a friend, John Paul, each chipped in $350 and started a frozen seafood business. Piszek’s mother pressured her son to name the company after her…but instead they named it Mrs. Paul’s Kitchens after John’s mom. Piszek bought out his partner in the 1950s but kept the Mrs. Paul’s name. In 1982 he sold the company to Campbell Soup for a reported $70 million.
EARL GREY
In his day Charles Grey, the second Earl Grey (1764–1845) was best known as the prime minister of Great Britain who ended slavery throughout the British Empire. Today he’s better known for the gift he received when a British envoy saved the life of a Chinese government official. The grateful official sent Grey a diplomatic gift of black tea flavored by the oil of a citrus fruit known as bergamot. Grey liked the tea and started serving it in his home; when his supply ran low, he asked his London tea merchant, Twinings, to make more. Guests who enjoyed the prime minister’s tea and wanted some for themselves would go to Twinings and ask for “Earl Grey’s tea.” Today it’s the most popular blend of tea in the world.
Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader Page 2
