THE FINAL OINK
Thirteen years passed before the matter was finally settled. So who did England and the United States get to solve the problem? Kaiser Wilhelm I, of Germany. He agreed to serve as their neutral arbiter and appointed three experts to examine the evidence. In October 1872, the German leader finally rendered his verdict: “The boundary line shall be drawn through the Haro Channel.” The kaiser gave San Juan Island to the United States.
As for the wayward pig that started the whole fiasco…it’s assumed he ended up on either Cutlar’s or Griffin’s dinner table.
* * *
IS IT TOO LATTE?
It turns out too much caffeine can kill you. How much is too much? According to www.energyfiend.com, it would take 435 cans of A&W Creme Soda to kill a 185-pound man. Brewed coffee: 117 cups. Red Bull energy drink: 157 cans. Snapple Decaffeinated Lemon Tea: 2805 bottles.
Not our fault: The first Friday the 13th of each year is national Blame Somebody Else Day.
RATHERISMS
Anchorman Dan Rather may be known as a serious journalist, but we love him for these odd phrases, ad-libbed during election night coverage.
“This race is hotter than a Times Square Rolex.”
“The presidential race is swinging like Count Basie.”
“This race is humming along like Ray Charles.”
“Bush is sweeping through the South like a big wheel through a cotton field.”
“In southern states, Bush beat Kerry like a rented mule.”
“You know that old song: It’s delightful, it’s delicious, it’s de-lovely for President Bush in most areas of the country.”
“His lead is as thin as turnip soup.”
“Keep in mind they are teetotally meetmortally convinced they have Ohio won.”
“The re-election of Bill Clinton is as secure as a doubleknot tied in wet rawhide.”
“We don’t know whether to wind a watch or bark at the moon.”
“These returns are running like a squirrel in a cage.”
“This race is as tight as a too-small bathing suit on a too-hot car ride back from the beach.”
“Bush is sweeping through the South like a tornado through a trailer park.”
“This race is as tight as the rusted lug nuts on a ’55 Ford.”
“This race is spandex-tight.”
“This race is shakier than cafeteria Jell-O.”
“When it comes to a race like this, I’m a long-distance runner and an all-day hunter.”
“The Michigan Republican primary is tighter than Willie Nelson’s headband.”
“His lead is as thin as November ice.”
“A lot of people in Washington could not be more surprised if Fidel Castro came loping through on the back of a hippopotamus this election night.”
There is an underground church in Poland carved from solid salt.
THE DEATH OF SUPERMAN
In 1992 the world’s most famous superhero was “killed”—and he nearly took the entire comic book industry down with him.
WRITERS OF STEEL
It was 1990. The writers of the Superman comic books wanted to do something new with their character. So that July, after a courtship that began in Action Comics in 1938, they had Clark Kent finally pop the question to Lois Lane. With tears in her eyes, Lois accepted. “Clark,” she said, “I’ve already decided…Yes. I want to share my life with you.” A few months later, in Action Comics #662, mild-mannered Clark revealed to Lois his true “super” identity.
With all of these plot developments, comic fans were energized. And as they awaited the “wedding of the century,” comic book sales skyrocketed. Some newspapers even treated it as real news, printing articles about the famous couple’s impending nuptials. But despite all the hoopla, the brass at DC Comics suddenly instructed their writers to put the story on hold. There was a problem.
ABC was working on a new Superman television show, Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, and production was behind schedule. The premiere had to be postponed: Instead of debuting in the fall of 1992 as originally planned, ABC had to move it back a year to 1993. But producers were excited about the media exposure generated by the Man of Steel’s marriage and felt that if it coincided with the new TV show, it would translate into strong ratings. They wanted “the wedding” to be postponed, too.
BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD
Every year, the writers and editors of Superman comics hold a meeting they call the “Super Summit” to plot, a year in advance, the stories for each of the four different Superman comic books: Superman, The Adventures of Superman, Action Comics, and Superman: The Man of Steel. The meetings are essential because each of the titles are linked, and the events of one book help to shape what happens in the others.
Q: What is the national drink of Poland? A: Mead (honey-based wine).
When they met in the fall of 1991 to create the stories for the upcoming year, suddenly they had to start from scratch. With the wedding scrapped, how would they keep fans interested? Faced with pressure from all sides, the writers decided they had to do something extreme—Superman would die. “At every single meeting we’ve ever had, as a joke, somebody would say, ‘Let’s kill him.’ It never failed,” revealed longtime Superman editor Mike Carlin. “But then we actually did it.”
SAY IT ISN’T SO
When the news was leaked to the media six months later, it created a storm of publicity—even more than the wedding had. The writers at DC knew the death of Superman would be a big deal to comic fans, but they had no idea how big the public’s reaction would be. Comic book controversy was nothing new—in fact, earlier that same year, a Marvel Comics character named Northstar had made news when he “revealed” he was gay. But he was just a minor character; Superman was…Superman.
The story broke on the June 16, 1992, cover of Newsday, and it spread like wildfire, appearing in newspapers all over the United States, Canada, and even as far away as Germany and Australia. The publicity department at DC Comics, meanwhile, remained tight-lipped, refusing to address any questions pertaining to Superman’s death.
IT’S A BIRD! IT’S A PLANE! IT’S…DEAD!
So what could kill the Man of Steel? It wasn’t longtime nemesis Lex Luthor or even kryptonite. It was Doomsday—a giant gray-and-white monster whom writer Dan Jurgens referred to as “primal rage incarnate.” Doomsday leveled skyscrapers, spawned chaos, and crushed innocent bystanders. Appearing first in Superman: The Man of Steel #18, he ravaged the streets of Metropolis over the course of a storyline that spanned seven comic books.
Finally, on November 18, 1992, in Superman #75, after a savage fistfight between Superman and Doomsday, both fell to the ground…dead. The comic book was packaged in black plastic and included a poster and a black armband.
The first printing flew off the shelves, prompting DC Comics to publish a second edition (but without the promotional items). When that one sold out, DC published the entire seven-issue story in a trade paperback. In the end, they sold more than 6 million copies of the comic book in its various printings, making the “Death of Superman” one of the best-selling comics of all time.
Adding salt to grapefruit will make it taste sweeter.
RESURRECTION
Despite what the readers believed, Superman’s death was never meant to be permanent. DC issued an eight-issue story titled “Funeral for a Friend,” in which friends and superheroes mourned Superman (who appeared in every issue as a corpse). The subsequent series, “Reign of the Supermen,” involved four superheroes (a child, an alien, a robot, and a man in an iron suit), each claiming to be Superman’s heir. Readers were left to guess whether there was a connection between any of the new characters and Superman. (There wasn’t.) Finally, in Superman #82, released in October 1993, a benevolent alien reinserts life into Superman’s dead body.
The death of Superman represented the last real boom of the comic book industry. The Man of Steel was everywhere. Saturday Night Live ran a sketch t
hat featured several superheroes attending Superman’s funeral. On December 31, 1992, Roseanne Arnold appeared on The Tonight Show. Her New Year’s resolution: to hunt down Superman’s killer and “make him pay for what he did.”
POSTMORTEM
Superman the cultural icon recovered, and the Superman TV show was a hit for ABC (it lasted until 1997). But Superman the comic book hero? When Superman was revived, fans felt ripped off, and most of them never went back. Result: all comic-book sales went down—1993 had been the biggest-selling year ever, topping $1 billion, but since then they’ve declined almost 70 percent. Today, both DC and Marvel Comics make most of their money from movies, such as Spider-Man, Batman, and X-Men. Doomsday seems to have struck a fatal blow from which the comic book industry, unlike Superman, has never quite recovered.
One Last Thing: The wedding that started it all didn’t happen until 1996, when Lois and Clark got married on the screen and in the comic. The TV episode was a hit; the comic book wasn’t.
In ancient Rome, men sometimes painted hair on their bald heads.
ODD FACTS ABOUT CHARLES DICKENS
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…” wrote Charles Dickens, whose life was a rich mixture of all the above.
WHAT THE DICKENS?
Charles Dickens was the first literary superstar—his popular works reached a wider audience than any writer before him. With classics like Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, and David Copperfield, Dickens dominated the literary life of 19th-century England and the United States. But like many remarkable people, Dickens was a complex, multi-layered individual, full of peculiar quirks and odd habits.
• OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE. Dickens was preoccupied with looking in the mirror and combing his hair—he did it hundreds of times a day. He rearranged furniture in his home—if it wasn’t in the exact “correct” position, he couldn’t concentrate. Obsessed with magnetic fields, Dickens made sure that every bed he slept in was aligned north-south. He had to touch certain objects three times for luck. He was obsessed with the need for tidiness, often cleaning other homes as well as his own.
• NICKNAME-IAC. Just as some of his most endearing characters had odd nicknames (like Pip in Great Expectations), Dickens gave every one of his ten children nicknames like “Skittles” and “Plorn.”
• EPILEPTIC. Dickens suffered from epilepsy and made some of his characters—like Oliver Twist’s brother—epileptics. Modern doctors are amazed at the medical accuracy of his descriptions of this malady.
• PRACTICAL JOKER. Dickens’s study had a secret door designed to look like a bookcase. The shelves were full of fake books with witty titles, such as Noah’s Arkitecture and a nine-volume set titled Cat’s Lives. One of his favorites was a multi-volume series called The Wisdom of Our Ancestors, dealing with subjects like ignorance, superstition, disease, and instruments of torture, and a companion book titled The Virtues of Our Ancestors, which was so narrow that the title had to be printed vertically.
The position paid peanuts, anyway: Charles Schulz was once turned down for a job at Disney.
• EGOMANIAC. Dickens often referred to himself as “the Sparkler of Albion,” favorably comparing himself to Shakespeare’s nickname, “the Bard of Avon.” (Albion is an archaic name for England.)
• FAIR-WEATHER FRIEND. Hans Christian Andersen was Dickens’s close friend and mutual influence. Andersen even dedicated his book Poet’s Day Dream to Dickens in 1853. But this didn’t stop Dickens from letting Andersen know when he’d overstayed his welcome at Dickens’s home. He printed a sign and left it on Andersen’s mirror in the guest room. It read: “Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks, which seemed to the family like AGES.”
• MESMERIST. Dickens was a devotee of mesmerism, a system of healing through hypnotism. He practiced it on his hypochondriac wife and his children, and claimed to have healed several friends and associates.
• CLIFF-HANGER. When The Old Curiosity Shop was published in serial form in 1841, readers all over Britain and the United States followed the progress of the heroine, Little Nell, with the same fervor that audiences today follow Harry Potter. When the ship carrying the last installment approached the dock in New York, 6,000 impatient fans onshore called out to the sailors, “Does Little Nell die?” (They yelled back that...uh-oh, we’re out of room.)
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THE BIG BURRITO
At the 2004 Nevada State Fair, volunteers attempted to set a record for the world’s largest burrito. Ingredients: 8,200 tortillas; 2,000 pounds of refried beans; and 1,000 pounds each of sour cream, cheese, and salsa. The finished product was 8,076 feet long, totalling about 8,433,200 calories—enough to feed the average person for 11½ years.
The crossed bones on a pirate flag are human thighbones.
IT’S A WEIRD, WEIRD CRIME
In the history of the BRI, we’ve written about smart crooks, dumb crooks, and even nice crooks. But these crimes were committed by crooks of an entirely different breed.
TO TELL THE TOOTH
“A toothless man has been arrested for stealing toothbrushes. According to O Dia newspaper, 32-year-old Ednor Rodrigues was filmed taking seven toothbrushes from a supermarket in Ribeirao Preto, Brazil. When he was approached by the police, he tried to deny the robbery—even showing the officers his toothless mouth. He finally admitted to the crime: ‘I don’t know why I did it. I know it was stupid. I have no teeth, what was I thinking?’”
—Sunday Mail [Scotland]
SCALPED
“Paul J. Goudy, of Lemoyne, Pennsylvania, was sentenced to 23 months probation after pleading guilty to theft by unlawfully taking a man’s hairpiece. Last January, Edward Floyd was sitting at a Harrisburg restaurant when Goudy ripped the hairpiece off Floyd. Restaurant witnesses identified Goudy and when questioned by police he admitted that he’d done it on a dare—a friend had offered him $100 to steal the hairpiece. Dauphin County Judge Richard A. Lewis also fined Goudy $500 and ordered him to write a letter of apology to Floyd.”
—United Press International
COMPUTERCIDE
“George Doughty of Lafayette, Colorado, won’t have any more problems with his computer. He was accused of shooting his Dell laptop four times with a Smith & Wesson revolver in the middle of his Sportsman’s Inn Bar and Restaurant. He then allegedly hung the remains of the laptop on the wall ‘like a hunting trophy,’ said Lt. Rick Bashor of the Lafayette Police Department.
The catacombs beneath the city of Paris contain the bones of more than 3 million bodies.
“Doughty, 48, who owns the establishment, entered the bar from his office and told the two patrons and bartender that he was going to shoot his computer. He then set his laptop on the floor, warned the customers to cover their ears and fired away. Doughty never explained what prompted his actions, but told police that ‘it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.’”
—Court TV
KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE PRIZE, NOT THE PIES
“A 280-lb. thief broke into a Romanian bakery and stole $250, but couldn’t resist the sweet temptation. He got stuck trying to exit through a window—after stuffing himself full of pies. The 29-year-old man was still stuck there in the morning when the shop owner, Vasile Mandache, arrived for work. He said, ‘I saw all the pie wrappers on the floor, and then saw a pair of stubby, fat legs hanging out the window. I just had to call my friends to come and have a look before we called the police, it was so funny.’”
—Short News
A PIG’S RANSOM
“‘Raw fruit and vegetables—or else the pigs get it!’ That’s what a Gallatin, Tennessee, woman read in a ransom note after a pair of concrete swine were swiped from her front yard. The foot-tall plaster porkers, one dressed in farmer’s overalls and the other in a pink dress, vanished from in front of Mary Romines’ trailer. Other pieces of statuary, including concrete chickens and a few other pigs, were
disturbed, but not taken. Tacked to the front gate was a note with a specific demand: two ears of corn and one ripe mango.
“Two days after the piggies, worth about $10 each, flew the coop, Romines got another menacing message—a well-done pork chop attached to a note reading, ‘Cooked the Pig.’ The next night, another note raised the demands—a potato in addition to the corn and mango. Signed ‘The Big Bad Wolf’ and accompanied by a bag of pork rinds, the note asked Romines if she was scared. ‘They think they have me buffaloed, but now I’m mad,’ Romines said. ‘They may think it’s funny, but they’re going to be charged with theft.’ Police agreed that the perpetrator will be criminally charged. The case remains under investigation.”
—Fox News
2 in 3 Americans believe in telepathy; 1 in 6 Canadians do.
THE SAD TALE OF CENTRALIA
On Valentine’s Day, 1981, eleven-year-old Todd Domboski was walking through a field in Centralia, Pennsylvania, when a 150-foot-deep hole suddenly opened beneath his feet. Noxious fumes crept out as the boy fell in. He only survived by clinging to some newly exposed tree roots until his cousin ran over and pulled him to safety. What was happening here…and why?
COAL COUNTRY
Eastern Pennsylvania is anthracite coal country. Back at the turn of the 20th century, miners were digging nearly 300 million tons of coal per year from the region, leaving behind a vast subterranean network of abandoned mine shafts. In May 1962, while incinerating garbage in an old strip mine pit outside of Centralia, one of the many exposed coal seams ignited. The fire followed the seam down into the maze of abandoned mines and began to spread. And it kept spreading—and burning—for years.
Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader Page 23
