DINNER FOR TWO
One night in March 2008, Julio Diaz exited the subway at his stop in the Bronx, New York. When the 31-year-old social worker reached the stairs, a man held a knife to his back and demanded his wallet. Diaz slowly turned around, and noticed that his mugger was only a teenager. He took out his wallet and gave it to him. As the teen was walking away, Diaz, on a whim, decided to offer his coat. “If you’re going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you’ll want to keep warm.”
“Why are you doing this?” the teen asked.
“If you’re willing to risk your freedom for a few dollars, then I guess you must really need the money.” The teen accepted Diaz’s coat. Then Diaz invited him to join him at his favorite restaurant. The teen accepted. Once there, the two just talked for a while as they ate dinner. When the check arrived, Diaz explained that he didn’t have any money, but if the teen gave him his wallet back, then he’d treat him. The teen gave the wallet back. As he stood up to leave, Diaz asked for one more thing—the knife. The teen handed that to him as well and then left the restaurant.
Hair relaxer: At any given time, 15% of your hair follicles are resting.
THE UN-FRIENDLY SKIES
At one time, you had to do something bad to get in trouble with airport security.
READ ’EM AND WEEP. In 2010 A Pomona College senior considering a career as a U.S. diplomat in the Middle East stuck his Arabic-language flashcards in a pocket before heading through airport security. He planned to brush up on his vocabulary during a flight from Philadelphia to California. Instead, he spent four hours in a holding cell, two of them in handcuffs. Plenty of time to consider whether the cards for “bomb” and “terrorism”—though highly relevant to his chosen field—should have been left at home.
NO YOLK! In 2011 a TSA agent handcuffed and detained 35-year-old Valerie Baul at the Philadelphia airport. The offense? She cracked a plastic egg over an agent’s head after he asked what it contained. At the time, Baul was wearing a fuzzy pink bunny costume and carrying a basket filled with eggs that had already passed through the X-ray machine. (The eggs contained confetti.)
MOUSETRAP. Israeli scientists have begun testing a new kind of body scanner. It looks like a traditional airport scanner, but hidden inside are three trays filled with mice, specially trained to sniff out bomb-making chemicals. If the mice smell chemicals, they escape into a side chamber and trigger an alarm. In a test run, mice successfully detected all 22 chemical-tainted mock-terrorists planted among 1,000 shoppers in a Tel Aviv shopping center.
BIG MOUTH. In 2005 Dr. Esha Khoshnu, a New Jersey psychiatrist, was flying out of Phoenix on her way to San Diego. TSA tagged her for a random bag inspection. That’s when, according to airport staff, she got “mouthy and snippy.” Khoshnu said, “Even if I had a bomb, you wouldn’t find it.” That was enough—TSA detained her. She missed her flight, but was released. For some reason, however, Khoshnu’s luggage—the bag that needed to be searched because the TSA thought it might contain a bomb—was still loaded onto the San Diego-bound plane. Once the plane reached San Diego, Khoshnu’s bag was blown up on the tarmac.
Snowflake rule of thumb: The colder the air, the smaller the flake.
ACTION FIGURE FACTS
Uncle John would like to remind you, once and for all, he is not playing with his “dolls.” They are action figures.
GOODBYE, DOLLY
In 1964 designers at Hasbro Toys came up with a line of military dolls. Executives loved it, but the marketing department felt that boys would never buy anything called a “doll,” a term associated with girls’ toys. So they coined the term “action figure” to describe any human-like posable doll that was marketed to boys. And that toy line—G.I. Joe—was the first successful “action figure.” Here are some more action figure facts.
• The Name Game: “Action figure” is more than a marketing term—it’s also been used as a legal distinction. In 2003 manufacturer Toy Biz, which made Marvel, TNA Wrestling, and Lord of the Rings action figures, argued before the U.S. Court of International Trade that its products were toys, and not dolls. Why? Because companies have to pay higher tariffs on importing dolls produced in other countries—toys are subject to half the rate. Toy Biz lawyers argued that dolls are representations of humans, whereas action figures depicted “nonhuman creatures” (like super-heroes) or characters (like wrestlers) Toy Biz won the case.
• Rarest Action Figure: When The Simpsons went on the air in 1990, a hurricane of Simpsons merchandise flooded the market. Surprisingly, Simpsons action figures were poor sellers. How poor? A Bart Simpson doll wearing a shirt that says “Save Blinky” (the three-eyed fish who lives in the contaminated lake by the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant) was available only by mail via Mattel Toys. Anybody could send away for it, but only three people did. Those are the only three known to exist; they’re each worth about $1,000.
The Castilian, Burgundian, Mexican, Confederate, and US flags have all flown over Arizona.
• The Birth of (He-)Man: Mattel passed on the opportunity to produce toys based on the Star Wars films. Big mistake: The movie went on to generate more than $1 billion in action figure sales well into the 1980s. Mattel wouldn’t make a toy line based on the 1982 hit movie Conan the Barbarian, either, because it was R-rated. Instead, it created a new line of toys, combining the space fantasy of Star Wars and the beefcake and sorcery of Conan, and called it He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Toys and comic books sold well, but they didn’t take off until a TV cartoon series aired in 1983—specifically designed to boost sales of the toys (a children’s-programming practice later made illegal by the FCC). It was the bestselling toy line of the 1980s.
• Movies to Toys: Other toy companies didn’t seem to mind an R rating. R-rated movies with kids’ action figure lines include Rambo, Toxic Crusaders, Terminator 2, RoboCop, and Aliens.
• Toys to Movies: A group of businessman and artists formed a company called Toy Vault in 1998 to fill what it thought was an overlooked market: toys based on children’s literature. They bought the action figure rights for Alice in Wonderland and Lord of the Rings, and although no Alice in Wonderland figures were ever produced, the Lord of the Rings figures (Gandalf and Balrog) sold so well that executives at New Line Cinema decided that there was a market for big-budget Lord of the Rings movies.
• Most-Hyped Figure That Ever Existed: In late 1985, Mattel held a contest in which kids could send in their ideas for a new He-Man action figure. The best entry would be mass-produced and sold by the company. The winner: 12-year-old Nathan Bitner from Naperville, Illinois. His idea: Fearless Photog, a good-guy monster whose head is a video camera that drains the evil out of bad guys. Bitner won a $100,000 college scholarship, but the action figure was never produced. (Mattel did send him a picture of a prototype, though.)
• Most Valuable Action Figure: In the first wave of Star Wars toys—which didn’t hit the market until 1978, a year after the film’s release because Kenner didn’t anticipate the huge demand—a Darth Vader action figure came with a telescoping lightsaber. (The saber’s handle ejected from his hollow arm, and then a thinner piece came out.) It was very difficult to make and it broke easily, both in the factory and at home, so only the first wave had this feature, later replaced with a single-piece version. Only a few hundred were made and sold. Average value today: $6,000.
In 1935 Humpty Dumpty Drive-In owner Louis Ballast trademarked the word “cheeseburger.”
BODIES IN MOTION
It’s hard to stay disinterested about disinterment. Throw in (or dig up) some celebrities, and you’ve unearthed some great bathroom reading.
ELVIS PRESLEY (1935–77)
Claim to Fame: The King of Rock ’n’ Roll
Interred: When Presley passed away at age 42 in August 1977, he was initially entombed in a special “family room” crypt inside the mausoleum at the Forest Hill Cemetery in Memphis, Tennessee. The crypt had slots for eight people, and Presley’s mother Gladys,
buried nearby, was moved to a space near her son.
Disinterred: In the month following Presley’s death, it’s estimated that more than a million fans crowded into the cemetery, disrupting other mourners and forcing the Presley estate to pay for extra security. Then, two weeks after the funeral, three men broke into the cemetery in the middle of the night and were charged with attempting to steal the King’s body to hold it for ransom. The charges were later dropped; the men carried no tools and may simply have been trespassing. But the incident put a scare into Elvis’s father, Vernon Presley. He felt his wife and son would be safer at Graceland, so he obtained a zoning variance to convert the estate’s “Meditation Garden” into a six-plot private cemetery. Both Elvis and his mother were disinterred and buried at Graceland the following October. Vernon Presley died in 1979 and is buried there, as is his mother, Minnie Mae, who died in 1980.
JACKIE WILSON (1934–84)
Claim to Fame: A legendary R&B and pop singer of the 1950s and ’60s, Wilson had numerous top-10 singles, including “Higher and Higher” and “Lonely Teardrops.”
Buried: In 1975 Wilson collapsed from a heart attack while singing “Lonely Teardrops” onstage. He never fully recovered, and after lingering in nursing homes for eight years, he died in 1984. Wilson’s finances weren’t great even before the heart attack, and after almost nine years of round-the-clock care, his estate was broke. There was no money for a headstone; his grave in the Westlawn Cemetery in Wayne, Michigan, was marked only by a board with his name on it.
Don’t tell your kids! In Brazil the school day starts at 7:00 a.m. and ends at noon.
Exhumed: Three years later, Wilson’s grave still had no marker. That’s when Florida disc jockey Jack “The Rapper” Gibson launched a fundraising drive to buy one. He raised enough money for a small marble crypt, and in June 1987 the remains of Wilson and his mother, who died a few weeks after his heart attack, were exhumed and interred together. Inscribed at the bottom of their marble marker: “No More Lonely Teardrops.”
LEE HARVEY OSWALD (1939–63)
Claim to Fame: On November 22, 1963, Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Two days later he was gunned down by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby.
Buried: After Oswald’s body was autopsied, it was returned to his family and buried at the Rose Hill Cemetery in Fort Worth, Texas.
Exhumed: In 1981 Oswald’s grave was reopened at the behest of Michael Eddowes, a British conspiracy theorist who believed that the man buried in Oswald’s grave was a Soviet KGB assassin. Oswald had lived in the U.S.S.R. from 1959 to 1962, and Eddowes was convinced that a KGB double agent had returned to the United States in Oswald’s place on a mission to kill JFK. Exhuming the corpse and comparing the skull with Oswald’s dental records, he argued, would prove the man in the grave was not Oswald.
Oswald’s widow, Marina, thought Eddowes’s theory was nuts, but she had her own theory, namely that Oswald’s body had been secretly removed from the grave and cremated “to prevent vandalism.” She supported Eddowes’s request to have the body exhumed because it would enable her to find out if the grave was empty.
It wasn’t. When the grave was dug up in October 1981, it did indeed contain a body. After the head was removed and the teeth cleaned and X-rayed, the new X-rays matched Oswald’s dental records perfectly. “Beyond any doubt, and I mean absolutely any doubt,” the lead pathologist told reporters, “the person buried under the name Lee Harvey Oswald is Lee Harvey Oswald.”
Worldwide, only 6% of airplane pilots are women.
BLOOD & BOOTY
American history might have been written in French or Spanish. Here’s part of the reason it wasn’t.
PLUNDERERS FOR HIRE
In 1562 some French Protestants known as Huguenots landed on what is now Parris Island, near Beaufort, South Carolina. Like the English Pilgrims who would arrive a half century later, the Huguenots wanted religious freedom. This group, led by Captain Jean Ribault, also wanted riches: They were privateers. In an era when navies were smaller than they are today, countries hired armed private ships and crews to do much of their pillaging and plundering for them. Privateers were an accepted part of naval warfare: Under admiralty law, if captured they were supposed to be treated as prisoners of war, even if what they were doing looked a lot like piracy.
The Huguenots were going to do their pillaging under the French Crown. After raising a stone marker on Parris Island and claiming all the surrounding land in the name of King Charles IX, Ribault sailed back to France for supplies. He left behind 28 men to establish a fort, with enough food for six months and sufficient arms and munitions for defense. The men immediately set to work building a shelter made of wood and earth, with a straw roof. They dug a moat around it and added four bastions—bulwarks from which they could defend the new settlement. Then they waited...and waited... and waited. But Ribault did not return. The problem: By the time Ribault reached home, France was embroiled in a full-blown religious war between Protestants and Catholics and had no money to spare for his resupply mission. So Ribault sailed on to England, hoping to find a sponsor there. Instead, he ended up imprisoned in the Tower of London by a suspicious Queen Elizabeth I.
WE’LL NEVER HAVE PARRIS
When their supplies ran out, the abandoned men panicked. They cobbled together a ship using pine resin to seal the wood and moss to caulk the seams. Then they sewed their shirts and sheets together to make sails and begged the natives for rope to rig them. The 15-year-old cabin boy took one look at the ship that they planned to sail across 3,000 miles of ocean (with no navigator) and decided to stay with the Indians.
In 1810 the average American drank 5 gallons of liquor per year. In 2010: 1 gallon.
The would-be colonists spent more than a year at sea, much of the time drifting for lack of wind. The food they’d brought dwindled to 12 corn kernels per man a day. When that was gone, they ate their shoes and leather jackets. Then they turned to cannibalism, choosing one of their own to eat so the rest might live. Fourteen months into their voyage, adrift and within sight of France but unable to steer what was left of their poorly built vessel, a British ship spotted them. They were rescued and taken to England.
HERE THERE BE SILVER
Two years later, Ribault’s lieutenant, René Laudonnière, sailed a second band of colonists to the New World. He landed at the mouth of the St. John’s River (near present-day Jacksonville, Florida), a perfect spot for attacking the galleons returning to Spain via the Gulf Stream. But while his men built a new fort—called Fort Caroline—Laudonnière discovered spoils closer at hand: gold and silver bangles jingling around the natives’ ankles. He decided to befriend them and discover the source of their wealth. First, he promised to aid a local chief in his war with an inland rival. Then, to curry favor with the rival chief, he rescued the prisoners being held by the first chief and returned them home. Pretty soon neither leader trusted the French commander.
The same went for his own men. Tired of waiting for treasure—and food—they plotted to get rid of him. Thirteen mutineers stole some small ships, and set to sea to attack Spanish ships. Bad idea. Spain had already targeted the colonists at Fort Caroline as “a nest of pirates” and sent one of its most brutal commanders—Pedro Menendez de Aviles—to wipe them out.
GOD VS. PIRATES
By the time Menendez arrived, Ribault had been released from the Tower and returned to France. From there he went to the New World with seven ships and 500 soldiers, where he reinforced and resupplied Fort Caroline, left a small company of men to help Laudonnière guard the fort, and set sail with the rest of his crew. If all went well, he would wipe out the Spanish before Menendez could establish a stronghold. As for Menendez, he built fortifications on ground protected by water on three sides and named the new fort San Augustin (St. Augustine). Being a devout Catholic, he also prayed. He was certain that God would be on his side against the Protestant pirates.
The world’s first nuclear reactor w
as built under the University of Chicago football stadium.
SURRENDER OR STARVE
Ribault’s ships made their way down the coast toward St. Augustine, not knowing that a hurricane thundered toward shore. While the French were battered by the hurricane, Menendez took his forces overland to Fort Caroline. He destroyed the fort and killed nearly everyone there, including the sick, the elderly, the women, and the children. Laudonnière survived by abandoning his post and fleeing with a few followers. Meanwhile, the storm blew Ribault’s ships past the inlet that led to St. Augustine and smashed them against the barrier islands. Ribault and his men survived, but had to make the 180-mile trek back to Fort Caroline on foot, only to be stymied when they reached an inlet south of St. Augustine. How would they cross?
Back from destroying the fort, Menendez and his troops were only too happy to help. They offered to ferry the French across, if they agreed to lay down their weapons and surrender. Famished and exhausted, the shipwrecked privateers let themselves be taken captive, expecting to be treated as prisoners of war. Menendez promised to do “whatever God directed him to do.” The Spanish ferried the French across the inlet a few at a time, led them into the dunes, and put them to the sword. Locals named the place Matanzas—the Spanish word for “slaughter.”
Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® Page 22
