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

by Michael Brunsfeld

  —USA Today

  Nice kitty: The Des Moines Zoo once used a tiger as a watchdog.

  CRAZY FOR STAR WARS

  When Star Wars was released in 1977, it became a cultural phenomenon. Twenty-eight years later, in May 2005, the hype once again reached a fervor with the release of Revenge of the Sith. Thousands of crazed fans lined up for weeks in advance to see Anakin Skywalker finally turn into Darth Vader, proving that we didn’t have to go to a galaxy far, far away to see some strange creatures…

  THE DARK SIDE

  At movie theaters worldwide on May 19, 2005, opening night for the final Star Wars episode, Revenge of the Sith, looked like Halloween in springtime: Kids were dressed up as Jedi knights; women wore their hair in Princess Leia-like buns; Imperial stormtroopers ushered viewers into the theaters; and several Darth Vaders wandered through the crowds in their shiny black helmets. But a few of the Vaders were up to no good. One showed up at a premiere of Sith in Springfield, Illinois, calmly walked into the theater lobby, pushed an employee away from the counter (apparently he didn’t have the Force), and stole all the cash from the register. Then he went back outside, where he blended in with all the other Darth Vaders. The following night, another robber—this one wearing black pants, a Star Wars T-shirt, and a Vader mask—used a stun gun to rob a pizza delivery man in Kissimmee, Florida. Both Darths got away.

  USE THE FIRE EXTINGUISHER, LUKE!

  Two die-hard Star Wars fans in England tried to stage (and film) their own lightsaber battle. The pair of wannabe Jedis, a 20-year-old male and his 17-year-old female friend, built their makeshift lightsabers out of two discarded fluorescent light tubes. Bad idea: they poured gasoline into the tubes and lit them on fire. Early on in the battle, their tubes collided and shattered—splattering them with glass and flames. Both were hospitalized with severe burns…just like Anakin Skywalker!

  Yum! Pork-stuffed crickets are a popular snack in Burma.

  THIS ISN’T THE THEATER YOU’RE LOOKING FOR

  On May 25, 1977, the original Star Wars premiered at Hollywood’s Grauman’s Chinese Theater. For weeks afterward, crazed fans lined up to see the movie. So what better place to see the final Star Wars film than in the theater where it first played? One problem: the final Star Wars film wasn’t going to be playing at Grauman’s. Not knowing this, hardcore fans started lining up seven weeks before opening day—and most shuffled away somberly when they were told (weeks later) that Sith was opening at another theater. Unwilling to admit defeat, though, eleven indignant fans stayed put.

  “We’ve heard all this before,” said fan Sarah Sprague, speaking of the false rumors that circulated prior to the first two prequels. But this one wasn’t a rumor. Twentieth Century Fox had signed a deal with another theater. A fan organization called LiningUp.net staged a protest. Said one angry member, “Grauman’s is the Star Wars mecca. The studios knew we were going to line up here, made the decision to show the movie elsewhere, allowed us to line up for weeks, and then told us for sure the movie wouldn’t be playing here. Then they offered us seats at a nearby theater, only to retract their offer a week later. It isn’t right. We just want to see the movie.” Ultimately the Dark Side prevailed—they were forced to wait in line at the other theater and miss the opening-night showings.

  * * *

  C-3PO FACTS AND GOSSIP

  • C-3PO has the first line in the first Star Wars (“Did you hear that? They’ve shut down the main reactor!”) and the last line in the last one (“Oh no!”).

  • Anthony Daniels, on getting the part: “I was quite insulted to be offered a role as a robot; I was a serious actor. I wasn’t going to be in some weird American movie as a robot, yet my agent insisted.”

  • Kenny Baker (R2-D2), on Daniels: “He’s been such an awkward person over the years. If he just calmed down and socialized with everyone, we could make a fortune touring and making personal appearances. I’ve asked him four times now but the last time he looked down his nose at me like I was a piece of s*#@ and said, ‘I don’t do any of these conventions—go away, little man.’”

  The sound a grasshopper makes is called stridulation.

  FRONTIER WOMEN

  It took a lot to survive on the frontier. Most histories of the Wild West focus on men—cowboys, gunfighters, chiefs—and ignore the fact that women could be powerful, influential, and hell-raising, too.

  CALAMITY JANE (1852–1903)

  Claim to Fame: Soldier, caregiver, hell-raiser

  Her Story: Born Martha Jane Cannery in Missouri, she was one of the most famous American women of the 19th century. Yet it’s difficult to know for sure exactly what she actually did. Why? Because much of her legend comes from pulp-fiction writers, as well her own trumped-up autobiography. And then there were her days of touring with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, where Jane told many more tall tales about her rugged life. Here’s some of what she claimed:

  • She was married to Wild Bill Hickok and had his child.

  • She was a scout for General Custer.

  • She was a Pony Express rider.

  • The name “Calamity Jane” was given to her by an army captain who she rescued single-handedly in an Indian fight.

  Historians doubt these claims. But what makes Jane so interesting is that she could have told the truth and would still have been considered an amazing woman. Here’s what is known:

  • She was an expert horsewoman and sharpshooter.

  • She often dressed as a man and fought Indians.

  • A hard drinker who chewed tobacco (and cussed a lot), she was highly respected by the men she rode with.

  • During a smallpox epidemic in Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1876, Jane nursed many of the sick back to health.

  Most likely, Calamity Jane got her nickname simply because trouble seemed to follow her everywhere. In the end, alcoholism got the better of her—she died penniless at 51 years old.

  NELLIE CASHMAN (1845–1925)

  Claim to Fame: Humanitarian, entrepreneur, adventurer

  Her Story: Cashman emigrated to Boston from Ireland with her sister and mother in the mid-1860s. An adventurer at heart, Cashman heard stories of the Gold Rush and decided to go west. She boarded a ship, sailed down the Atlantic coast to Panama, crossed the isthmus on a donkey, then set sail for San Francisco. But she didn’t settle there—Cashman wanted to go where the action was, so in 1872 she moved to Nevada and worked as a cook in various mining towns while panning for gold. Using the little money she earned, she opened her first boardinghouse in Panaca Flat.

  Q: Who has the most appearances on the cover of Sports Illustrated? A: Michael Jordan.

  Frontier Angel

  Once the boardinghouse was up and running, Cashman sold it, joined a group of 200 gold prospectors, and headed for Cassiar, British Columbia. She opened another boardinghouse there, then moved on to Victoria. But as a devout Catholic, Cashman’s desire to help people was as strong as her love of adventure. Shortly after arriving in Victoria, she got news of a scurvy epidemic in Cassiar. She hired six men and hauled in 1,500 pounds of food and supplies—a trip that took 77 days, often through blizzard conditions. She nursed 100 men back to health and received the first of many nicknames, “Angel of the Cassiar.” Other names given to her in time: “Frontier Angel,” “Saint of the Sourdoughs,” “Miner’s Angel,” and “the Angel of Tombstone.”

  All across the West, from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Tombstone, Arizona, Cashman was responsible for establishing restaurants, hotels, grocery stores, hospitals, and churches. Charitable almost to a fault, she would sooner give a free meal to a hungry man than try to make a profit. Along the way, Cashman had many male suitors, but she turned them all down. When, in 1923, a reporter asked her why, she replied, “Why child, I haven’t had time for marriage. Men are a nuisance anyhow, now aren’t they? They’re just boys grown up.”

  Nellie Cashman lived a long, hard life that never saw her slow down. She died at the age of 79—after contracting pneumonia on a
750-mile dogsled journey across Alaska.

  OTHER FRONTIER WOMEN

  • Libby Smith Collins. Like Nellie Cashman, Collins proved that a woman was capable of running a business. Her birthdate is unknown, but she came west with her parents sometime in the 1850s. After her husband, a cattle rancher, fell ill in 1888, Collins took it upon herself to transport their herd from Montana to the stockyards of Chicago. She almost didn’t make it: the railroad company wouldn’t let her board—it was against regulations for an unaccompanied woman to ride on a train. Collins fought the rule, got it changed, and made a tidy profit in Chicago. She took the trip alone every year after that, earning her the nickname “Cattle Queen of Montana.” A movie by that title was released in 1954, based on Collins’s life and starring Barbara Stanwyck and Ronald Reagan.

  The Greek Parthenon has no straight lines and contains no mortar.

  • Cattle Kate (1861–1889). Born Ella Watson, Cattle Kate is more famous for the way she died than the way she lived: she was lynched by a vigilante mob in 1889 for alleged cattle rustling. After setting up a cattle ranch in Sweetwater Valley, Wyoming, Kate had tried to register a brand with the state, but the Wyoming Stock Growers Association used their power to squash small-time ranchers. So Kate bought a brand from a neighboring farmer and began homesteading her land. This infuriated the big ranchers, who claimed ownership over the entire Sweetwater Valley. So a group of them took the law into their own hands and hanged Kate and her husband, Jim Averell. No one was ever tried for the crime.

  • Pearl Hart (1870) The only woman convicted of stagecoach robbery was Canadian-born Pearl Hart. She and a partner named Joe Boot held up a stagecoach in Arizona in 1899 (reportedly because Pearl needed money for her dying mother). They got caught, and newspapers ran with stories of the “Lady Bandit.” Hart gained even more notoriety from her disdain for authority: “I shall not consent to be tried under a law in which my sex had no voice in making!”

  She was sentenced to five years in prison in Yuma, Arizona, but served only three. She claimed that she was pregnant, so they released her early. After that, Hart was never heard from again.

  * * *

  “Women have a right to work whenever they want—as long as they have dinner ready when you get home.”

  —John Wayne

  Even for sharp cheese? A dull knife can slice cheese thinner than a sharp one.

  HI PHI

  Anyone who’s read Dan Brown’s best seller The DaVinci Code is probably familiar with what Brown and others call a “mystical” number that shows up with remarkable regularity in nature, art, music, and architecture. Some even call it a “cosmic blueprint.” Some of Brown’s claims are far-fetched, but some aren’t—they’re real…and fascinating. The number is known as Phi, a modern term for a very old concept.

  TAKE A NUMBER

  The story starts with Euclid, a Greek mathematician who lived in the 3rd century B.C., considered by experts to be the most important mathematician in history (his book Elements is still referenced today—2,000 years after he wrote it). Euclid wanted to find the point on a line that divides that line into two segments with a special relationship: the ratio of the entire line to the large segment is equal to the ratio of the large segment to the small segment. He found it, and called his discovery extreme and mean ratios. Here’s what it looks like:

  The ratio of line L to segment A is the same as the ratio of segment A to segment B, or L/A = A/B.

  The ratio can also be expressed as a number: 1.61803398875…(the number is infinite—the digits go on forever). To meet Euclid’s requirements, line L must be 1.618… times larger than segment A and segment A must be 1.618… times larger than segment B. (Euclid didn’t use the number, he explained it with an equation.)

  THE DIVINE PROPORTION

  In 1509 Italian mathematician Luca Pacioli published a treatise entitled De Divina Proportione (illustrated by Leonardo daVinci) in which he gave the ratio the name divina proportion, because, he said, “just as God cannot be properly defined, nor understood through words, likewise this proportion can never be designated through intelligible numbers.” Since then the ratio has been given many names, such as the Golden Section, the Golden Mean (from Euclid’s “extreme and mean ratio”), and the Golden Ratio.

  According to experts, camels have the worst breath in the animal kingdom.

  GOLDEN DISCOVERIES

  • Leonardo Fibonacci, a 12th-century mathematician, developed an amazing sequence of numbers. The sequence starts with zero and one, and continues by adding the two previous digits.

  0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55… and so on.

  • Robert Simson, a Scottish mathematician, proved in 1753 that the ratios of successive Fibonacci numbers moved closer and closer to the mysterious Golden Ratio.

  Fibonacci had found the sequence by computing how fast a pair of rabbits could multiply under ideal conditions. The answer is his number sequence, and since his sequence is so related to the Golden Ratio—the Golden Ratio was believed to have a mysterious presence in the natural world.

  NUMBER BUILDER

  Around the turn of the 20th century, American mathematician Mark Barr gave the Golden Ratio the name it is often referred to today—Phi. He named it in honor of the Greek sculptor Phidias (500 B.C.–432 B.C.), who he was convinced used the ratio in his sculptures. Others claim that Phi was used in ancient art and architecture because it has a naturally balancing and pleasing aspect to it. (Some mathematicians dispute these claims, attributing them to coincidence.) A few examples:

  • The Egyptians may have used Phi in the design of the pyramids. The Great Pyramid of Khufu (3200 B.C.) appears to have been designed so that the ratio of the height of its triangular face to half the side of the base is equal to Phi.

  • Many art historians are convinced that Phidias applied the Golden Ratio to his design of sculptures for the Parthenon. The dimensions of the Parthenon itself follow the Golden Ratio of Phi.

  • Other buildings that seem to utilize the Phi ratio: the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris and the UN building in New York City.

  A rhinoceros beetle can push 850 times its weight, equivalent to a man pushing a tank.

  • DaVinci may have used Phi to define the proportions of his painting of The Last Supper, as well as the face of the Mona Lisa, and his classic drawing known as Vitruvian Man was an effort to prove that the ideal human body is made of building blocks whose proportional ratios always equal Phi.

  • The famous opening notes of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony (“duh-duh-duh-duuuuhh”) occur not only in the first and last bars but also exactly at the Phi point of the symphony.

  • Antonio Stradivari, still considered the greatest violin maker ever, placed the f-holes in his violins according to Phi ratios.

  NATURAL WONDERS

  The Phi ratio is frequently found in nature, which may explain much of the mysticism surrounding Phi. Some examples:

  • The number of petals on a flower are, for some reason, very often a Fibonacci number. Black-eyed susans and chicory flowers have 21 petals; plantains have 34; daisies have 89.

  • The ratio between the number of male and female bees in a beehive can be shown to be related to Phi.

  • A nautilus shell is a spiral. The ratio of each spiral’s diameter to the next is Phi. It’s the same for the rate of curve of a DNA spiral.

  • The number of and configuration of leaves on the stems of many plants can be measured in Phi ratios.

  • A sunflower’s seeds grow in opposing spirals on the flower. The number of seeds in each row grows at the Phi ratio. This is also true of pinecones and pineapples.

  Think it has no application to your life? The dimensions of a Kit Kat candy bar are in a Phi ratio, as is the National Geographic logo. Trek mountain bikes are proportioned according to Phi, too. Need another example? So is your Visa or MasterCard.

  * * *

  “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed t
o be.”

  —Douglas Adams

  First primates in space: Two spider monkeys named Able and Miss Baker.

  NUDES & PRUDES

  So what side of the debate do you take—are you offended by public nudity, or are you offended by people who are offended by it?

  NUDE: When the Boise, Idaho, City Council passed an ordinance outlawing total nudity in public except in cases of “serious artistic merit,” Erotic City Gentleman’s Club (a strip joint) responded with “Art Nights.” On Monday and Tuesday nights they passed out sketch pads and pencils so that patrons could draw the strippers as they danced. “We had a lot of people,” owner Chris Teague told reporters, “drawing some very good pictures.”

  PRUDE: So did Art Night work? Nope: In April 2005, Boise police raided Erotic City on Art Night and cited three of the nude dancers. “The law clearly states that the exemption does not apply to adult businesses,” says Lynn Hightower, spokesperson for the Boise Police Department. “If it were an art studio and models were actually posing, that would be one thing. These women weren’t posing.” Erotic City says it will fight the charges in court…but the dancers will have to wear pasties and G-strings until further notice.

  NUDE: When Stu Smailes died in 2002 at the age of 69, he left the city of Seattle $1 million to buy a new fountain. There’s a catch—Smailes’s will stipulates that in order for Seattle to claim the money, the fountain must include “one or more unclothed, lifesize male figure(s).” Furthermore, it must be designed in “the classical style”—in other words, no cheating by making it unrecognizably abstract. “Smailes was a very funny man,” said his attorney, Tim Bradbury. “He had a very strong sense of humor.”