Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader

by Michael Brunsfeld

  7. a) Liason b) Liaison c) Liaision

  8. a) Harras b) Harrass c) Harass

  9. a) Occurrence b) Ocurence c) Occurence

  10. a) Embarrass b) Embarass c) Embaras

  11. a) Indipendent b) Independant c) Independent

  12. a) Questionaire b) Questionairre c) Questionnaire

  13. a) Brocolli b) Broccoli c) Broccolli

  14. a) Recomend b) Recommend c) Reccommend

  15. a) Sincerelly b) Sincerly c) Sincerely

  16. a) Kindergarten b) Kindegarten c) Kindergarden

  17. a) Supercede b) Superseed c) Supersede

  18. a) Grammar b) Gramar c) Grammer

  19. a) Refered b) Referred c) Reffered

  20. a) Immence b) Immense c) Imense

  29% of elementary school students say math is their favorite subject, 21% say science.

  FAKE NEWS

  The mark of a truly good phony news story: People in high places fall for it.

  KENNY ROGERS: ROASTED

  The Web site Zug.com reported that a book signing by country music star Kenny Rogers had disintegrated into a riot in which 19 people were injured. According to the report, Rogers had refused to sign a female fan’s unspecified body part; the fan turned violent and incited the crowd. Zug linked to a report on the Web site of WTF-TV, based in Hazelton, the location of the riot. MSNBC, ABC, and the Associated Press all carried the story. But they failed to verify all of the facts: WTF-TV isn’t real (WTF is Internet shorthand for “What the f***?”), Hazelton isn’t real, and there was no riot. Kenny Rogers hadn’t even written a book. Zug and WTF’s sites both even had disclaimers telling readers the whole thing was a prank. Zug’s intent: to point out that the news media often rushes to report stories without verifying their accuracy.

  WE REFUSE TO RETRACT

  In 2004, the Chinese newspaper Beijing Evening News reported that the United States Congress had threatened to move out of Washington, D.C., unless a new, modernized Capitol building with a retractable roof was built. Evening News writer Huang Ke had copied, nearly word for word, the entire story from its source: The Onion. (Ke didn’t know that The Onion is a satirical newspaper.) The Evening News refused to admit fault, until the story was proven to be untrue. A few days later the paper apologized, but blamed The Onion for the error, writing “Some American newspapers frequently fabricate offbeat news to trick people into noticing them with the aim of making money.”

  HOOSIER DADDY

  In 2003 the Hoosier Gazette ran an item on its Web site about an Indiana University study that found that 100 percent of parents irreversibly lose 12 to 20 IQ points upon the birth of their first child. That, according to lead researcher Hosung Lee, is why every parent thinks their kid is the world’s funniest, smartest, and cutest. Newspapers in England, Russia, and the Netherlands ran the report, and it was the lead story on Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC talk show. The only problem: the Hoosier Gazette is a comic newspaper; the story and study were hoaxes. The next day, Olbermann apologized on air, saying, “So there’s no survey showing that parenthood will cost you at least 12 IQ points. But did you hear about the one showing how many IQ points newscasters lose when they see a story they really want to run?”

  Squirrels can climb trees faster than they can run on the ground.

  IN OTHER NEWS: THE PRESIDENT IS NOT A NINJA

  In 2002 two teenagers started the “Fake CNN News Generator” Web site to prank their friends with phony news stories that looked like they came from CNN. Without the teens’ knowledge, word of mouth took over: after the site was mentioned on a morning radio show, two million visitors a day suddenly started generating “Fake CNN News” stories…and spreading them. Newspapers and TV stations ran dozens of stories they thought had originated with the real CNN, among them that rock star Dave Matthews had died of a drug overdose and that the Olsen twins had decided to attend Miami University. (Matthews and Miami U. both had to issue public denials.) Most angered, though, was CNN. Only a week after the Fake CNN News Generator was inadvertently made public, the cable news channel sent a threatening “cease and desist” letter and shut the impostor down.

  TERRORISTS WANT TO INTERRUPT YOUR DINNER

  In late 2002 Dan Nichols, a detective in Branch County, Michigan, read an article entitled “Al-Qaida Allegedly Engaging in Telemarketing.” Nichols had been leading an investigation of scams that targeted the elderly, and he jumped on the story, using it as the basis for a press release. He warned the public that buying magazines, time shares, or long-distance service over the phone could be funding terrorist cells. Local and national news picked up the story…which was bogus. Nichols had read it in The Onion.

  Unaware that it was satire, Nichols says he got to the article via a link on the Michigan Attorney General’s Web site. (The AG’s office denies linking to The Onion—they’re aware it’s fake.) “I enjoy a good joke,” Nichols said, “I just hate it when it’s on me.”

  Most popular reading material of 1900: The Bible and the Sears catalog.

  EDITED FOR SENSITIVITY

  In the weeks after 9/11, the entertainment industry scrambled to remove any images of the World Trade Center or casual references to terrorism from new movies, music, or television. Here are a few examples.

  In September 2001, Jackie Chan was supposed to start filming Nosebleed, in which he was to play a World Trade Center window washer who uncovers a terrorist plot to blow up the towers. It was going to be filmed on location. It was scrapped entirely.

  • Images of the World Trade Center were digitally removed from the background of episodes of Law and Order, Friends, and The Sopranos. (Interestingly, the 2003 miniseries Angels in America was shot after 9/11, but since it takes place in the 1980s, the towers were digitally reinserted for historical accuracy.)

  • The first trailer for Spider-Man showed a group of criminals thwarted when Spidey traps them in a web and hangs their entangled helicopter between the two WTC towers. After 9/11, the trailer was immediately removed from circulation, as were posters that showed a reflection of the Twin Towers in Spider-Man’s eye.

  • Party Music, an album by the rap group The Coup, was delayed a month until October 2001 in order to redesign the cover. The original version pictured two members of the group holding a detonator in front of the World Trade Center, engulfed in flames.

  • In the original ending of Men in Black II, the World Trade Center towers split open and release a cloud of UFOs into the air, setting off a huge urban battle. After 9/11, a new sequence was produced.

  • Microsoft deleted the World Trade Center from the New York skyline for its popular virtual pilot video game, Flight Simulator.

  • The Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie Collateral Damage was originally supposed to hit movie theaters in October 2001, but was delayed until February 2002. The plot: a firefighter travels to South America in pursuit of the terrorists that killed his family.

  • Producers of the 2002 film version of H. G. Wells’s novel The Time Machine cut a scene in which meteors rain down on New York City and cause mass destruction.

  Mississippi did not ratify the 13th Amendment (which outlawed slavery) until 1995.

  • The comedy Big Trouble, which climaxes with a nuclear bomb that threatens to explode a passenger airplane, was delayed from September 2001 to April 2002.

  • The scheduled November 2001 opening of the Broadway musical Assassins, about the men and women who had tried to kill American presidents, was postponed.

  • Release of the crime drama Heist was moved a month forward to November 2001 because of a scene in which Gene Hackman’s character outsmarts airport security and brings a bomb on a plane.

  • Although it had already been released in early 2001, the rock band Jimmy Eat World changed the name of their album Bleed American to Jimmy Eat World after 9/11. The original title seemed lurid in light of terrorist attacks on American citizens.

  * * *

  SPACED-OUT SPORTS

  “The trouble with o
fficials is they just don’t care who wins.”

  —Tommy Canterbury, basketball coach

  “I have a God-given talent. I got it from my dad.”

  —Julian Winfield, Missouri basketball player

  “Ninety percent of putts that are short don’t go in.”

  —Yogi Berra

  “It was a once-in-a-lifetime catch that only happens every so often.”

  —Randy Moss

  “I might just fade into bolivian.”

  —Mike Tyson

  “No comment.”

  —Michael Jordan, on being named one of the NBA’s most reporter-friendly players

  Youngest champion diver: Fu Mingxia (she won the women’s world title at age 12 in 1990).

  TICK TOCK TIMELINE

  What better way to tell the history of clocks than with a timeline?

  PRE-HISTORY

  Early humans had no way to keep accurate time, but did they need to? Following the sun’s path across the sky told them when it was morning, midday, afternoon, and night—enough to gauge when their prey (or predators) were out. Clocks wouldn’t become necessary until the advent of civilization, when humans stopped roaming the plains and started building cities.

  • 1500 B.C. The world’s first timepiece, the sundial, appears in Egypt. Using a pole, or gnomon, to cast the sun’s shadow, a clock is etched into the dial face to give a somewhat accurate reading of the time of day, but only if it’s sunny out. (The day is divided into 12 two-hour segments.) The sundial spreads first to Greece and then to the rest of the civilized world, where it will be the common (and only) timekeeping device for more than a millennium.

  • 400 B.C. The earliest version of a mechanical clock, the clepsydra, or water clock, appears in Greece. It measures time by dripping water at a constant rate from one bucket, through a small hole, into a second bucket. The receiving bucket has marks along its side corresponding to the time of day. While not as accurate as a sundial, it could at least tell rudimentary time at night or on cloudy days.

  • 250 B.C. In Greece, a mechanical bird is attached to the clepsydra. It whistles when the water reaches a predetermined level, creating the world’s first alarm clock.

  • A.D. 980 The Saxon king Alfred the Great measures time with specially made candles that are designed to burn at a constant rate. It’s not very reliable.

  • 1300s Sandglasses, also known as hourglasses, are used in cold climates (where water freezes). One problem is that the coarse grains of sand gradually wear away the center hole and shorten the time it takes for the sand to pour through, which throws off the accuracy. On ships, a 28-second sandglass is used to gauge speed: A wooden log is attached to a rope and then thrown overboard. The speed at which the rope, which is knotted about every 47 feet, runs out gives us the nautical term knots.

  It takes 14 seconds for water at the top of Venezuela’s Angel Falls to reach the bottom.

  • Late 1300s The word “clock” first enters the English language. It comes from the medieval Latin clocca, meaning “bell.” Linguists believe it is an onomatopoeic word, resembling the sound a bell makes when it clangs (which is used to alert townsfolk as to the time). The word won’t be used in its modern form until the late Middle Ages, when large clocks begin to replace the bells in bell-towers (such as Big Ben in London).

  • 1400s European scientists begin work on a fully mechanical clock, which spawns the verge and foliot system, a T-shaped device driven by lead weights that move one hand around a clock face. A toothed wheel is turned by the main gear, which is designed to turn, then stop, then turn again, at regular intervals. The ticking clock has arrived.

  • 1450 The spring-driven clock makes its debut. The weights are replaced by springs, but the technology is still in its early stages. Result: as the spring unwinds, the clock slows down.

  • 1504 Peter Henlein of Germany creates the first portable—but not very accurate—timepiece that can be carried in a pocket.

  • 1577 The minute hand is invented by Jost Burgi. He adds it to a clock that he is making for Tycho Brahe, an astronomer who needs a more accurate clock for stargazing (so he can better predict the movement of the planets and stars). Minute hands won’t be common on clocks until more than a century later.

  • 1602 Like Brahe, Galileo Galilei needs an accurate timekeeping device for his astronomical work. After noticing that a pendulum swings at a constant rate, he draws up plans for a pendulum clock, but never builds one.

  • 1657 Dutch clockmaker Christiaan Huygens markets the first pendulum clock, claiming it will “keep equaller time than any now made.” The pendulum replaces the foliot of earlier clocks. The toothed wheel is still there, momentarily preventing the gears from advancing, but it is now the regular swing of the pendulum that determines the rate at which the wheel advances.

  First African-American to star in a dramatic TV series: Bill Cosby, in I Spy.

  • 1650s French mathematician Blaise Pascal combines a piece of string and a pocket watch to create the first wristwatch, an idea that will take more than a hundred years to catch on.

  • 1680s The second hand begins appearing on a few specially made clocks, but also won’t be commonplace for another century.

  • 1714 English Parliament offers a cash prize of £20,000 to anyone who can solve “the problem of the longitude.” Without accurate sea clocks, ship captains can only guess how far east or west they’ve traveled. Sandglasses can only tell them their speed; pendulum clocks are accurate, but only work on level ground; spring-driven clocks still don’t keep good enough time. Over the course of a monthlong sea voyage, even slightly inaccurate timekeeping can result in a ship going hundreds of miles off course.

  • 1761 After nearly 40 years of experimenting, Englishman John Harrison answers Parliament’s challenge by inventing a clock that works at sea. Improved steel manufacturing allows him to utilize springs that are far superior to those used in earlier clocks. Harrison, a skilled metallurgist, uses some metals that expand and others that contract—important because of the extreme changes in temperature that chronometers are likely to encounter at sea. Harrison’s clock loses only five seconds in six weeks. It not only makes sea travel much more safe and reliable, it makes him rich.

  • 1783 Benjamin Hanks, a Connecticut goldsmith (and a former Revolutionary War drummer) patents the first self-winding clock.

  • 1787 The mechanical alarm clock is invented by Levi Hutchins of New Hampshire, but the alarm can only go off at 4 a.m.

  • 1845 The U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., begins dropping a time ball at noon each day. This allows ships on the Potomac River to set their chronometers precisely before heading out to sea. Other harbors around the world soon begin the practice. The final year the Naval Observatory will use its time ball is 1936. The ball won’t be dropped again until midnight, December 31, 2000, to mark the new millennium.

  • 1875 A popular song by Henry Work begins with the lyrics “Oh, my grandfather’s clock…” From now on pendulum clocks will become more commonly known as grandfather clocks.

  Pithy fact: The white membrane in citrus fruits is also called the “rag.”

  • 1876 Seth Thomas Jr. of New York City patents the first mechanical alarm clock that can be set to go off at any time.

  • 1886 The R.W. Sears Watch Company (later changed to Sears Roebuck) begins manufacturing the first mass-produced wristwatches.

  • 1905 A German clockmaker named Hans Wilsdorf sees three things wrong with wristwatches: they’re not very accurate, not very reliable, and not very fashionable. He tinkers with existing watches and starts the process of correcting all three problems. With his brother-in-law he starts the Wilsdorf & Davies Watch Company in England. In 1908 they change the name to Rolex.

  • 1923 British watch repairer John Harwood creates the self-winding wristwatch. It is much smaller than older watches, which required an exterior knob, or crown, to wind the watch, and also allowed dirt to get in the gears. Rolex adopts the tech
nology and perfects it in 1931 with its “Perpetual Rotor,” a mechanism now seen as “the basis for self-winding movements.”

  • 1926 The Rolex Oyster is released, the world’s first waterproof timepiece (not counting the hourglass).

  • 1927 A Bell Laboratories scientist named Warren Marrison creates the first quartz clock, accurate to within two thousandths of a second per day. The technology will soon be used in wristwatches.

  • 1945 The idea of creating atomic clocks is presented by American physicist Isador Rabi. He suggests using a method called atomic-beam magnetic resonance. Simply put, this means finding an atom that continually vibrates at a constant, measurable frequency. Four years later, after finding the hydrogen atom too unstable for the task, the National Bureau of Standards creates the world’s first atomic clock, using ammonia.

  • 1957 The Hamilton Watch Company unveils the first electric watch. It uses the same balance-wheel mechanism that has been in clocks for centuries, but now a battery powers it instead of a spring, eliminating the need to wind the watch.

  • 1960 Using quartz technology, Bulova markets the first digital watch.

  Say what? THERE ARE ABOUT 4,000 WAX GLANDS IN EACH OF YOUR EARS.

  • 2000 Keeping time is more important than ever in modern society. Between watches, clocks, cars, cell phones, microwave ovens, radios, and DVD players, and computers, more than a billion new timepieces enter the world each year.

  • Into the Future… Scientists are finding that even atomic clocks may not be the most accurate way to keep time, at least with the method we’re using now. Here’s the technical lowdown from the Science Museum in London:

  Errors in the timekeeping of atomic clocks are mainly a result of the fact that the atoms are moving. If the atoms are made to move more slowly, accuracy increases. Caesium fountains are still in their experimental phase but have already achieved accuracies of one second in 15 million years. It is thought that by taking one into space, they may be made ten times better. An even more advanced type of clock is the trapped ion machine, which may eventually reach an accuracy of one second in 10 billion years.