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

by Michael Brunsfeld

Any of these will usually give you one chance to escape. So make your move and get away as fast as possible—and as loudly as possible. The best thing to yell is, “Call the police! I’m being attacked!” And yell it over and over.

  MOB

  At any sporting events, concerts, or other public gathering there’s always the possibility that a mob mentality will break out and people will get trampled. Keeping calm can save your life in this situation.

  • Know where the nearest exit is. Try to make a habit of looking for possible escape routes whenever you enter a new place. (This isn’t paranoia, it’s common sense.) At the first sign of trouble, start heading for the exit.

  • If you find yourself trapped in a mob, the most important thing is to stay on your feet and move with the crowd. Stopping for even a second may cause you to lose your footing and get trampled.

  • Take a deep breath and tense up your shoulders, biceps, and chest muscles. Bunch your arms up against your stomach to make yourself as solid as possible.

  • If you have a small child, carry him or her in front of you. If at all possible, don’t let the child walk.

  • Keep quiet for two reasons: 1) You’ll call less attention to yourself, which could save you from pepper spray, flying fists, or bullets; and 2) It can be hard to see through a mob, so keeping quiet may allow you to hear escape instructions from police or venue officials.

  BEING TIED UP

  Although this rarely occurs outside the movies, it does happen. If it happens to you, here’s a neat magician’s trick (Houdini used it) that may help you escape:

  • While your captor is tying you up, make yourself as large as possible by inhaling and pushing your chest out. Flex any muscles that are being tied up, but do it as subtly as possible so as not to raise suspicion. When your captor leaves, relax. You’ll get at least a half an inch of slack in the ropes, which should be more than enough for you to wiggle your way to freedom.

  Americans consume aspirin at a rate of 2,000 tablets per second.

  DUMB CROOKS

  More proof that crime doesn’t pay.

  BURNING TO GET RID OF THEM

  “A 46-year-old man allegedly set his own home on fire in order to get two visitors to leave. Dean Craig was charged with felony arson after splashing rubbing alcohol on the floor of the two-story home in Aurora Township, Illinois, and using a lighter to ignite the fire, the Kane County Sheriff’s office said. Craig allegedly had asked two visitors to leave, but when they refused, he threatened to light his house on fire. When police arrived at Craig’s home, it was engulfed in flames.”

  —Associated Press

  BOOK ’EM

  “The Boone County Sheriff’s Office arrested Robert White, 29, of Florence, Kentucky, after he allegedly borrowed more than $600 worth of books, CDs, and DVDs from the Boone County Public Library and sold them at the flea markets in Walton, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Ohio. Detectives said White also sold $20,000 worth of material from eleven other libraries in Ohio and Kentucky. How did they catch him? He used his real name when applying for a library card.”

  —ChannelCincinnati.com

  CHECK IT OUT

  “A Canyon, Texas, man walked into a store one morning and paid for his purchase with a check. The clerk took the required information from the man’s driver’s license, plus his phone number. After completing the transaction, he put the check in the register.

  “An hour later the check casher was back, this time with a knife. He proceeded to rob the store and make his escape. But he had made no attempt to alter his appearance, and the clerk had no trouble remembering him. When Randall County Sheriff’s deputies arrived on the scene, not only was the victim able to furnish a good physical description, he also handed over the check with the man’s complete identification information.”

  —Wanted! Dumb or Alive

  First American city to establish a police department: Boston, Massachusetts (1854).

  FUNNY BUSINESS

  And we don’t mean “ha-ha” funny.

  SPEED FILLS (THE COFFERS)

  In 2004 the city of Coopertown, Tennessee, realized they had a law-enforcement problem: the cops were costing the city too much money. The Robertson County Times reported that the police department cost about $125,000 to run, but that they had given out only $17,000 worth of traffic tickets. To take care of the problem, the city lowered speed limits and had the cops start handing out more tickets. In the first six months of 2005, the revenue from court fines jumped to more than $155,000—a 700 percent increase over all of 2003. “Our police department,” said Mayor David Crosby, “will be self-sufficient from now on.”

  MY FRIEND BILL

  In May 2005, the government watchdog group Public Citizen found an odd provision in the 700-page Senate energy bill: it provided federal loan guarantees to “coal-gasification” plants in any “western states” situated at an elevation above 4,000 feet. Public Citizen looked to see how many companies fit that description and found only one: Medicine Bow Fuel & Power of Medicine Bow, Wyoming. That company was formed by DKRW, a Houston-based energy company—started and run by former executives of Enron. If the bill passed, the provision would give the company hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in loans—money they wouldn’t have to pay back if the company failed.

  After Public Citizen issued a statement about the questionable provision, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee denied that it was written with DKRW in mind. The proposal was written for another project, they said, that hadn’t been publicly announced yet…and was a secret.

  HUMBLE STUDENTS

  While four University of Memphis basketball players were playing in a big Saturday-night game for the school in 2004, the campus apartment they all shared was broken into and burglarized. According to the police report (which got into the hands of the local press), the stolen items included: $2,500 in diamond earrings, $4,000 in custom-made shirts, $6,000 worth of shoes, and eight mink coats worth $40,000. Two days later a university spokesman said the report was wrong—the mink coats were only worth $28,800 and didn’t actually belong to the students, who were all on scholarships. (It is forbidden for colleges to pay athletes.)

  Sounds fishy: In 1992, a 352-pound tuna sold at an auction in Japan for $69,273.

  GREASING THE WHEELS

  In June 2005 documents leaked to the New York Times showed that Philip Cooney, chief of staff to the White House Council on Environmental Quality, had altered several scientific reports on global warming. His changes, such as adding the words “significant and fundamental” before the word “uncertainties,” softened the reports’ findings. Richard Piltz, the former government official who leaked the documents (he had resigned in disgust three months earlier), said that Cooney had made the changes to create “an enhanced sense of scientific uncertainty” about the implications of climate change.

  Cooney has no scientific training in his background; he’s a lawyer. His last job before President Bush appointed him to the White House: he was a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute. Two days after the Times revealed Cooney’s pseudo-scientific editing work, he resigned from his position. The White House said it was unrelated to the leaks.

  Final Funny Note: The day after Cooney resigned from the White House, he got a new job…at ExxonMobil.

  AND ON A GOOD NOTE…

  In December 2004, after an 18-month battle, Internet software company PeopleSoft was taken over by rival Oracle. Oracle immediately announced that 5,000 PeopleSoft employees would be laid off. In April 2005, David Duffield, PeopleSoft’s co-founder and former CEO (he quit when the company was taken over) started a fund called “Safety Net.” It offered as much as $10,000 in tax-free grants to any of his former employees who were in financial troubles because of the merger. He started the fund with $10 million of his own money.

  On the same day that Nero took his own life, lightning struck his 120-foot portrait.

  THE BIRTH OF THE NFL, PART II

  Professional footb
all was in trouble…until George Preston Marshall rode into town.

  ACTION ATTRACTION

  Let’s face it: Americans prefer watching sports that have the potential for a lot of scoring. That’s why professional football was still on the fringe in the 1930s. Most games featured one, maybe two touchdowns, and field goals were rarely attempted because the goalposts were at the back of the end zone. Result: many games ended in ties. College football fared better because the intense rivalries added drama, and the players were younger, faster, and played “for the love of the game.” With the exception of a few standouts, pro players, on the other hand, were seen as washed-up wannabes at best, or cheating thugs at worst. But was it the players’ fault—or the rules and business practices of the NFL?

  THE MARSHALL PLAN

  George Preston Marshall, a wealthy football fan, blamed it on the inherent faults of the game. Pro football needed excitement, and he made it his mission to add some—no matter what the purists thought. In 1932, using the small fortune he made from a laundromat chain, Marshall bought part ownership of the tottering Boston Braves. With him he brought a list of changes and set to work lobbying the other NFL owners to approve them.

  • Marshall liked to watch the players throw the ball, which rarely happened because of so many restrictions on the forward pass. In 1933 he persuaded the other teams to remove them.

  • He thought the ball would be easier to throw if it was smaller and pointier, so the following year he got the NFL to reduce the size of a regulation ball by about 1½” at the fattest part.

  • At Marshall’s insistence, the NFL moved the goalposts from the rear of the end zone to the goal line. That made field goals and extra-point kicks more likely to succeed, which increased scoring and reduced tie games.

  Carnivores eat meat; what do mellivores eat? Honey.

  • Another innovation Marshall pushed through was moving the ball 10 yards in from the sideline whenever play went out of bounds. That sped up the pace of the game; teams no longer had to waste an entire down (or two) getting it back to the center of the field.

  • Marshall was also the driving force behind splitting the league into eastern and western divisions. That added drama to the season by creating two races for divisional titles, followed by a championship game to decide the league’s best team.

  • In 1936 Marshall helped implement the NFL’s first college draft system, which evened out league play by giving the worst teams in the league the first shot at the best new players.

  IT’S A HIT

  Marshall’s changes worked. Pro football became more fun to watch, which put more paying customers in the stands, making the sport more commercially viable. The average attendance at an NFL game—about 5,000 people in the early 1930s—rose to nearly 20,000 by 1939.

  But the NFL still lacked the national attention it craved. That came thanks to a championship game in 1940. Marshall was once again in the middle of it all—but this time he lived to regret it.

  The Chicago Bears were up against the Washington Redskins, who Marshall had relocated from Boston after he bought the team. Two weeks earlier, the Redskins had finished the regular season by beating the Bears 7–3 after a Bears receiver dropped a pass in the fourth quarter. Chicago wanted an interference call; the refs didn’t make it, so the Bears went home losers. However, they knew that revenge was waiting for them in the upcoming championship game against those same Redskins.

  It didn’t help matters when Marshall, who had a reputation as a loudmouth (and a bigot—he was one of the last NFL owners to integrate his team), attacked the Bears after the game. “They can’t take defeat,” he told reporters. “They are a first-half club. They are quitters—the world’s greatest crybabies.”

  Marshall’s attack got the public interested in the rematch, which, by coincidence, would also be the first pro football game ever broadcast nationally over network radio. For millions of people living in cities with no pro football franchise, the broadcast would serve as their introduction to the NFL. (It was also the last NFL game in which a player—Bears end Dick Plasman—would play without a helmet.) If the game proved to be interesting to the folks listening at home, they’d probably tune in again during the 1941 season. The future of the entire league, not just the Bears and the Redskins, was riding on the game.

  First pro football team to have emblems on their helmets: The L.A. Rams.

  The Bears heard Marshall’s “crybaby” taunts and came out fighting. Under the leadership of their coach and owner, George Halas, the Bears slaughtered the Redskins 73–0, still the most lopsided defeat in the history of the NFL. More than 36,000 people witnessed the carnage at Washington’s Griffith Stadium, including a record 150 sportswriters from all over the country.

  George Preston Marshall, the man credited with saving the league in the 1930s by reinventing the game, would also be remembered for the worst loss ever.

  ON THE AIR

  Thanks to that one championship game, pro football was more popular then ever in 1941, but it still wasn’t the draw that baseball—or even college football—was. Radio helped to spread its appeal, but it was television that solidified it.

  TV was a brand-new medium in the late 1940s and NFL owners didn’t care about it—few people owned televisions. By 1950, however, there were an estimated four million TV sets in the United States, reaching some 30 million viewers. At first the NFL was against broadcasting its games, afraid that people would stay home and watch TV for free instead of paying to come to the stadium. What happened in California that year proved them right. The Los Angeles Rams decided to televise their entire season. Result: attendance at Rams games dropped by nearly half from 205,000 in 1949 to 110,000 in 1950. The Rams got the message. The following year they televised only away games, and attendance at home games shot up to 234,000. By the end of 1951, most teams were broadcasting their away games, but only away games. If fans wanted to see a home game, they had to watch it in person.

  Football and television seemed made for each other. Advancing the ball ten yards to gain a first down gave the game a lot of drama between touchdowns, and the short breaks between plays left plenty of time for analysis and commentary by experts. Even people who were new to football could learn about the game by listening to the announcers.

  Duration of the average wink: 1/10 of a second.

  Pro football’s fan base began to soar, and spending Sunday afternoon watching football quickly became an American institution. By 1954 an estimated 34 percent of the Sunday afternoon viewing audience was tuned to the NFL. Thanks to television, pro football was finally beginning to eclipse college football as the most-watched, most-important form of the sport. The National Football League—which for so long had been on the brink of failing—was now truly a “national” league. And it was here to stay.

  * * *

  …ONE MORE THING: THE AFL

  In 1959 Lamar Hunt, son of Texas oilman H. L. Hunt, applied to the NFL for an expansion franchise…and was turned down. So Hunt and several other spurned suitors formed the American Football League, which was the seventh or eighth league by that name (all the others had collapsed). The NFL responded to this challenge the same way it had all the others—it ignored the AFL and waited for it to die on its own.

  Seven years later the AFL was still in business in spite of the fact that CBS, which broadcast NFL games, refused to give AFL scores in its news broadcasts and Sports Illustrated printed only black-and-white photos instead of the color shots it used with the NFL. So in 1966 the two leagues agreed that their champion teams would meet in the first AFL-NFL World Championship Game on January 15, 1967. In 1970 the two leagues merged.

  “AFL-NFL World Championship Game” was a pretty clunky name, and Lamar Hunt wanted something better. One day he saw his daughter bouncing a rubber ball and asked her what it was. “A Super Ball,” she told him. “Super Bowl” started out as a nickname, but by the third inter-league championship game, played on January 12, 1969, the name was official. T
oday the Super Bowl is one of the biggest events of the television year, with 40 percent of U.S. homes tuning in to watch the game.

  Chance that a pro football player will be injured at least once in his career: 100 percent.

  HUT 1…HUT 2…HIKE!

  Football: A mindless game of men with helmets running into each other? Or a complex ballet of strategy mixed with speed and brute force?

  “Football isn’t a game but a religion, a metaphysical island of fundamental truth in a highly verbalized, disguised society, a throwback of 30,000 generations of anthropological time.”

  —Arnold Mandell

  “Let’s face it, you have to have a slightly recessive gene that has a little something to do with the brain to go out on the football field and beat your head against other human beings on a daily basis.”

  —Tim Green

  “The NFL, like life, is full of idiots.”

  —Randy Cross

  “Football isn’t a contact sport, it’s a collision sport. Dancing is a contact sport.”

  —Duffy Daugherty

  “Most football teams are temperamental. That’s 90% temper and 10% mental.”

  —Doug Plank

  “Pro football is like nuclear warfare. There are no winners, only survivors.”

  —Frank Gifford

  “I’d catch a punt naked, in the snow, in Buffalo, for a chance to play in the NFL.”

  —Steve Henderson

  “Baseball is what we were. Football is what we have become.”

  —Mary McGrory

  “If my mother put on a helmet and shoulder pads and a uniform that wasn’t the same as the one I was wearing, I’d run over her if she was in my way. And I love my mother.”

  —Bo Jackson

  “I like to believe my best hits border on felonious assault.”