DR. LOUIS PERRIER
In 1902 Sir St. John Harmsworth, an English aristocrat, was seriously injured in an auto accident and went to Vergeze, a spa town in France, to recuperate. While there, a local doctor named Louis Perrier had him drink mineral water from Les Bouillens (“bubbling waters”), a natural spring he owned. Its supposed health-giving properties had been touted since the days of the Roman Empire; Harmsworth thought it would make an excellent mixer for whiskey for his friends back home. He bought the spring from Dr. Perrier, renamed it in his honor (who’d drink a mineral water called Harmsworth?), and started bottling it in green bottles shaped like the Indian clubs that Perrier had him swing for exercise. By the 1980s, Perrier was the world’s best-selling mineral water.
A lot of kids have it: Lachanophobia—fear of vegetables.
RUSSELL STOVER
As we told you in The Best of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, an Iowa schoolteacher named Christian Nelson invented the world’s first chocolate-dipped ice cream bar in 1921, and at a dinner party someone suggested calling it Eskimo Pie. Here’s another part of the story: The person who came up with the name was Clara Stover, wife of Nelson’s business partner, Russell Stover. The Nelsons and the Stovers made a fortune their first year in business, but after 15 months, others began to copy their idea, nearly forcing them out of business. The Stovers sold their share for $25,000 and moved to Denver, Colorado, where they started making and selling boxed chocolates out of their home. Today Russell Stover Candies is the best-selling boxed chocolate brand in the United States.
DR. ANCEL KEYS
In 1941 the U.S. War Department asked Keys, a University of Minnesota physiologist, to develop a non-perishable, ready-to-eat meal that would be small enough to fit into a soldier’s pocket. Keys went to a local market and looked around for foods that would fit the bill. He came up with hard biscuits, dry sausages, hard candy, and chocolate bars; then he tested his 28-ounce, 3,200-calorie “meals” on six soldiers at a nearby Army base. The meals rated it only “palatable” and “better than nothing,” but they did relieve hunger and gave the soldiers enough energy to engage in combat. The Army threw in chewing gum, toilet paper, and four cigarettes…and named the packets “K-rations” in honor of their creator.
Melbourne, Australia, has an 8 p.m. curfew…for cats.
TOO RISKY FOR GUINNESS
If you make it into the Guinness Book of World Records and somebody breaks your record, your name gets taken out. Turns out there’s another way to get booted from the book.
BY THE BOOK
If you published a book of world records, what kinds of records would you allow into your book? What kinds would you keep out? The people at the Guinness Book of World Records have been asking themselves those questions for more than 50 years.
Founding editors Ross and Norris McWhirter took a conservative approach from the start: anything having to do with hard liquor or sex was out. “Ours is the kind of book maiden aunts give to their nieces,” the brothers once explained. Crime was out, too—the brothers didn’t want readers breaking laws just to get in the book.
As the years passed and the Guinness Book grew into an international phenomenon, a new problem arose: Some categories that were pretty dangerous to begin with—sword swallowing, fire eating, etc.—became more so as the winning records climbed ever higher. Do you remember the “Iron Maiden” category? That’s where a person lies down on a bed of nails, has another bed of nails placed down on top of him, then has hundreds of pounds of heavy weights piled on top of that. There’s a physical limit to how many weights you can pile on a guy sandwiched between two beds of nails before he dies a horrible, crushing death. Sooner or later, somebody trying to get into the book in the Iron Maiden category was going to be killed in the attempt. “We feel that’s something we shouldn’t encourage,” Norris McWhirter said in 1981.
WRITTEN OUT
So in the late 1970s, the Guinness Book of World Records began to close the book on some records that had been around for years.
Pucker up! You use 20 different muscles when you kiss.
“This category has now been retired,” the editors stated after some entries, “and no further claims will be entertained.” A few years later, many such categories disappeared from the book altogether.
That might have been it if not for the fact that the Guinness Book of World Records had changed hands a few times since then, and each new owner has had their own ideas about what should be included in the book. Some categories that were once deemed too dangerous were brought back…though in a few cases the old world records were forgotten or ignored and replaced with new “world records” that didn’t even beat the ones they replaced.
So who’s back in? Who’s still out? What else is new? Here’s a look at how some of the more unusual categories have fared.
IRON MAIDEN
Record Holder: Vernon Craig of Wooster, Ohio, who performed under the stage name “Komar”
Details: Craig set his world record on March 6, 1977, in Chicago, when 1,642 ½ pounds of weights were piled on top of him while he was sandwiched between two beds of nails.
What Happened: In the 1979 edition, Craig’s record appeared with the following note: “Now that weights in Bed-of-Nails contests have attained ¾ of a ton it is felt that this category should be retired. No further claims for publication will henceforth be examined.”
Update: By 2000 the record was reopened for competition; today it’s held by Lee Graber of Tallmadge, Ohio, who beat Komar’s record by 16 ½ pounds, for a total of 1,659 pounds on June 24, 2000. According to Guinness, the hardest part of Graber’s attempt was controlling his breathing, “as he had a lot of weight on his chest and needed to relax to avoid bursting a blood vessel in his head.” (Komar retired his Iron Maiden act in 2000 at the age of 68).
THE LONG SHOWER
Record Holder: Arron Marshall of Rockingham Park, Australia
Details: On July 29, 1978, Marshall stepped into his shower, turned on the water, and did not leave again until August 12, setting a world showering record of 336 hours.
What Happened: In the 1982 edition, his world record appeared with the following disclaimer: “Desquamination [skin peeling off in scales] can be a positive danger.”
Americans spend over 2 billion hours a year mowing their lawns.
Update: The category was closed and unlike the Iron Maiden, as of 2005 it has not been reopened. (Apparently long showers are more dangerous than the Iron Maiden.)
CAR JUMPING OFF A RAMP
Record Holder: Dusty Russell of Athens, Georgia
Details: In April 1973, Russell climbed into his 1963 Ford Falcon, sped up a ramp, and jumped more than 176 feet.
What Happened: The record was still there in the 1981 edition, but in 1982 it was gone.
Update: By 1998 the category was back, but with a slight modification: now a car has to “land on its wheels and drive on afterwards.” On August 23, 1998, an Australian named Ray Baumann set a new record, jumping his car 237 feet.
FIRE-EATING
Record Holder: Jean Chapman of Buckinghamshire, England
Details: On August 25, 1979, Chapman extinguished 4,583 flaming torches using only her mouth. It took her two hours.
What Happened: For the 1982 edition Chapman’s entry was followed with the disclaimer: “Fire-eating is potentially a highly dangerous activity.” The category was later dropped.
Update: By 2004 Guinness was accepting entries in a modified (and presumably safer) fire-eating category: most flaming torches extinguished in one minute. Current record holder: Robert Wolf, who extinguished 43 torches on July 30, 2004. According to press reports, Wolf “finished the very dangerous record attempt without any injury to others and sustained only minor burns to his mouth.”
* * *
SIX BALD ROCK STARS
• Rob Halford (Judas Priest)
• Fred Durst (Limp Bizkit)
• Moby
• Michael Stipe (R.E.M.)
• Billy Corgan (Smashing Pumpkins)
• Sinead O’Connor
Hitler’s jawbone is reportedly kept in the Russian Federation Archives.
THERE OUGHTA BE A LAW
The syndicated TV show Celebrity Justice asked a slew of celebrities to finish this sentence: There oughta be a law…
“…against people who scrape their silverware on plates. I hate that.”
—Rebecca Romijn
“…against people who get into the ‘10 items or less’ line with more than 10 items and use a credit card where it says ‘cash only.’”
—Samuel L. Jackson
“…against people who make jokes that aren’t jokes. Like when you say, ‘Is today Tuesday?’ And somebody says, ‘All day!’ That’s not a joke. Not funny. Don’t say it.”
—Hank Azaria
“…that if you are a good driver, and you have a reasonable IQ, you should be able to drive any speed you want.”
—Jenna Elfman
“…against honking your horn unless it’s absolutely necessary. Otherwise you’re going to drive everybody crazy, the stress level will come up, people will be fighting in the streets. Don’t honk your horn!”
—Dick Clark
“…against people coming into a meeting, in close quarters, with bad breath.”
—Coolio
“…against people that when they give you your change at the cash register, that they put the dollar down first, and then the change.”
—Elizabeth Perkins
“…that if a guy gets dumped by a woman on national TV, he should get half of everything she owns. I mean that’s how it works in the real world.”
—Charlie, The Bachelorette
“…and a serious fine for people who don’t pick up their dog turd, and I want them to be thrown in jail.”
—Marg Helgenberger, CSI
“…that the whole world sort of adopts Spain’s timetable, where you sort of take the whole day off to relax and have fun.”
—David Arquette
“…that people smile at at least three people every day.”
—Orlando Bloom
The Sun converts over 4,000,000 tons of matter into energy every second.
APRIL FOOLS!
It’s not unusual to find odd-but-true stories in the newspapers these days. But if the date on the paper is April 1…you might want to think twice before assuming it’s true.
In 1998 Burger King ran a full-page advertisement in USA Today announcing the new Left-Handed Whopper. “The new left-handed sandwich will have all condiments rotated 180°, thereby reducing the amount of lettuce and other toppings from spilling out the right side of the burger.”
• In 1993 a group calling itself “The Arm the Homeless Coalition” announced that volunteers dressed as Santa would be stationed outside local malls collecting donations to buy guns and ammo for the homeless citizens of Columbus, Ohio. “There are organizations that deal with food and jobs, but none that train homeless people to use firearms,” a spokesperson told reporters. A few days later three Ohio State University students admitted they’d made the whole thing up.
• In 1959 the Indiana Kokomo Tribune announced that due to budget cuts, the city police department would now be closing each night from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. Anyone who called the police after hours would have to leave a message on the answering machine, and in the morning a police officer would listen to the messages. “We will check the hospitals and the coroner, and if they don’t have any trouble, we will know that nothing happened,” the paper quoted a police department spokesperson as saying.
• In 1999, just four months after most of western Europe adopted the euro as a standard currency, England’s BBC radio service announced that England was scrapping the national anthem, “God Save the Queen,” in favor of a Euro anthem that would be sung in German. “There’s too much nationalism,” a spokesperson for the EU supposedly told the BBC. “We need to look for unity.”
• In March 1998, the newsletter New Mexicans for Science and Reason published a story claiming that the Alabama state legislature had passed a bill changing the mathematical value of pi from 3.14159 to the “Biblical value” of 3.0. On April 1 a physicist named Mark Boslough came forward and admitted he wrote the article to parody legislative attacks on the teaching of the theory of evolution.
An average water droplet contains 100 quintillion molecules of water.
• At about the same time that Pepsi made a worldwide change from its traditional white soda cans to blue ones in 1996, England’s Virgin Cola announced an “innovation” of its own: its red cans would turn blue when the cans passed their sell-by date. “Virgin strongly advises its customers to avoid ALL blue cans of cola,” the company said in an April 1 newspaper ad. “They are clearly out of date.”
• In 1996 America Online published a report that NASA’s Galileo spacecraft had found life on Jupiter. The following day they admitted they made it up. “Yes, it is a hoax,” an AOL representative told reporters, “but it’s a good one, don’t you think?”
• In 1993 the German radio station Westdeutsche Rundfunk in Cologne broadcast a report that the city had issued a new regulation requiring joggers to run no faster than 6 mph; running faster than that “could disturb the squirrels who were in the middle of their mating season.”
• In 1981 the Herald-News in Roscommon, Michigan, printed a warning that scientists were preparing to release 2,000 “freshwater sharks” into three area lakes as part of a government-funded study.
• In 1980 the BBC broadcast a report that London’s Big Ben was going to be remade into a digital clock and the clock hands would be offered for sale to the first listeners who called in. “Surprisingly, few people thought it was funny,” a BBC spokesman told reporters.
• In 1993 San Diego’s KGB-FM radio station announced that the space shuttle Discovery was being diverted from Edwards Air Force Base to a local airport called Montgomery Field. More than 1,000 people descended on the tiny airstrip, snarling traffic for miles. “I had to shoo them away with their video cameras,” airport manager Tom Raines told reporters. “A lot of them were really mad.”
• In 1981 England’s Daily Mail newspaper published a story about a Japanese entrant in the London Marathon named Kimo Nakajimi who, thanks to an error in translation, thought he had to run for 26 days—not 26 miles. The paper reported that there had been several recent sightings of Nakajimi, but that all attempts to flag him down had failed.
Many residents of Troublesome Creek, Kentucky, have blue skin.
WORD ORIGINS
Ever wonder where words come from? Here are some interesting stories.
EXPLODE
Meaning: Burst or shatter violently
Origin: “This word has a history in the theater, where its meaning was once quite different than it is today. Originally ‘explode’ meant to drive an actor off the stage by means of clapping and hooting. It is made up of the Latin prefix ex- (out) and plauder (to applaud). The word still retains the sense of rejection, such as in the act of exploding a theory—exposing it as false—and, in general use, there is still noise associated with things which explode.” (From Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, Volume II, by William and Mary Morris)
FILIBUSTER
Meaning: The use of prolonged speeches to obstruct legislative action
Origin: “From the Spanish filibustero, meaning ‘freebooter’ (which is derived from the Dutch vrijbuter). It was first used in English to designate a pirate or buccaneer in the Caribbean. In the 1850s, the word was used to signify adventurers who took part in illegal expeditions against Cuba, Mexico, and Central America to set up local governments that would apply to the United States for annexation. It was first used as a political term in the U.S. Senate in the late 1800s.” (From An Avalanche of Anoraks, by Robert White)
GOD
Meaning: Deity; creator of the universe; supreme being
Origin: “The term for the deity som
etimes is said to derive from ‘good,’ and there is some overlap between the two words. The words have different Indo-European roots, however. God has been traced to gheu-, meaning ‘to call,’ ‘to invoke,’ or ‘to offer sacrifices to.’ Good derives from ghedh- and means ‘to unite,’ ‘to join,’ or ‘bring together.’” (From Devious Derivations, by Hugh Rawson)
Sweet smell of success: The smell of peppermint improves the concentration of office workers.
STRIKE
Meaning: To stop working as a form of organized protest Origin: “First used to describe an event in 1768 when a group of angry British sailors demonstrated their refusal to work by ‘striking’ (taking down) their sails. As a labor term, it was first used in America in 1799 to describe a ten-week walkout by New York shoemakers.” (From Once Upon a Word, by Rob Kyff)
DOODLE
Meaning: Scribble absentmindedly
Origin: “Comes from the German word dudeln, meaning ‘to play the bagpipe.’ The notion seems to be that a person who spends his time playing bagpipes would be guilty of other frivolous time-wasting activities—like scribbling aimlessly on scraps of paper. Although the word has been around for several centuries, it did not come into widespread popularity in the United States until Gary Cooper used it in the famous film Mr. Deeds Goes to Town in 1936.” (From Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, Volume III, by William and Mary Morris)
MUMBO JUMBO
Meaning: Confusing language; nonsense
Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader Page 3
