Busiest mailing day in the U.S.: December 14th. Mail volume nearly doubles.
ESPERANTO TODAY
When L. L. Zamenhof introduced Esperanto in 1887, he included in Unua Libro a printed pledge form that the reader could tear out, sign, and send in—a commitment to learn Esperanto if 10 million other people made the pledge. Each book contained four copies of the pledge, so that the reader’s family and friends could also sign up.
Esperanto has been around for more than a 120 years now, and in all that time it’s doubtful that 10 million people ever learned to speak it. It never did become a universal language. It didn’t end violence. It didn’t prevent World War I or World War II. It didn’t save the world. It didn’t even save Zamenhof’s own children: All three were killed in the Holocaust, singled out for murder by the Nazis, who viewed Esperanto as a tool of the international Jewish conspiracy. (Zamenhof’s grandson Louis did narrowly escape; as of 2008, Louis, alive and well at age 83, was still attending the annual Esperanto World Conferences.)
Esperanto has never been endorsed as an official language of any country anywhere on Earth. In 1908 the tiny one-square-mile territory of Neutral Moresnet, consisting only of one village and a zinc mine in what is now eastern Belgium, tried to adopt Esperanto as its “national” language. That effort failed too.
STILL KICKING
But Zamenhof also placed great importance on the values and culture that grew up around his language. The language may never have fulfilled the high hopes that Zamenhof had for it, but Esperanto culture, though small, is still alive, its proponents still communicating in an artificial language invented by a schoolboy more than a century ago. Esperanto remains the most successful constructed language in history: Estimates vary as to how many people speak it today; the number could be anywhere from 100,000 to more than 2 million people in 80 countries around the world. The Internet has made learning it even easier, and has helped aspiring Esperantists to meet and get involved with each other. Esperanto will never replace English as an international language, but considering how long it’s been around, it’s likely to be around for a long time to come.
Templar Motor Co.’s 1919 roadster offered an odd option: a Kodak camera mounted on the exterior.
LET’S SPEAK ESPERANTO
Thinking of joining an Esperanto group near you? Bone! Here’s a list of phrases to get you started. (For the origin of Esperanto, go to page 195.)
Saluton! “Hello!”
• Mi volas iri al la kavoj. “I would like to go to the caves.”
• Kioma estas la horo? “What time is it?”
• Kiel vi fartas? “How are you?”
• Bone, dankon, kaj kiel fartas via edzino? “Fine, thanks, and how is your wife?”
• Mi ne komprenas. “I don’t understand.”
• Kiel vi povas fari tion al mi? “How could you do it to me?”
• Ni devas rapidumi. “We’re in a hurry.”
• Kafon kun sukero kaj lakto-polvoro, mi petas? “May I have coffee with sugar and non-dairy creamer?”
• Kiu diris tion? “Who told you that?”
• Mi iras al florejo. “I’m going to the florist.”
• Mankas varma akvo. “There is no hot water.”
• Konsentite: “It’s a deal!”
• Lasu min trankvile! “Leave me alone!”
• Pardonu. “Excuse me.”
• Mi bezonas keksojn. “I need cookies.”
• Jen (passing the cookies): “Here you are.”
• Ne faru tion. “Don’t do that.”
• Kion vi faris? “What did you do?”
• Kion vi diris? “What did you say?”
• Mi amas vin! “I love you!”
• Ripetu, bonvole. “Please repeat.”
• Mi estas okupata. “I’m busy.”
• Bonvolu ne fumi, mi petas. “Could you please not smoke?”
• Mi ne fumas. “I don’t smoke.”
• Sanon! “Gesundheit!”
• Voku la policon! “Call the police!”
Why were treadmills invented? So that prison inmates could use them to grind grain.
• Ni dancu. “Let’s dance.”
• Kio estas la problemo? “What’s the matter?”
• Mi estas edzino (female): “I’m married.”
• Kiel oni diras tion en Esperanto? “How do you say that in Esperanto?”
• Mi havas kapdoloron. “I have a headache.”
• Mi estas de Usono. “I’m from the U.S.”
• Ne gravas. “Never mind.”
• Kie estas mia mono? “Where is my money?”
• Mi soifas. “I’m thirsty.”
• Mi devas pisi. “I need to pee.”
• Vi estas freneza! “You’re crazy!”
• Irlandan viskion kun glacio, mi petas. “Irish whiskey on the rocks, please.”
• Mi preferas legomojn. “I prefer vegetables.”
• Hola, Moe! “Hey, Moe!”
• Certe! “Soitenly!”
• Kie mi estas? “Where am I?”
• Multan dankon. “Thank you very much.”
• Ne dankinde. “You’re welcome.”
KNOW YOUR LANDS
Archipelago: a chain of islands grouped or clustered close to each other.
Isthmus: a narrow stretch of land that connects two large landmasses, and with water on either side. The Isthmus of Panama, for example, connects North America to South America and is bordered by the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea. Atoll: an island in an ocean or sea that was formed out of a ring of coral.
Mesa: generally occurring in dry areas (like a desert), it’s a raised area of flat land atop steep walls. If it’s a vast, miles-spanning area, it’s a plateau. If it has a pointed top or summit instead of a flat top, it’s a butte.
Cape: a piece of land that juts out into a water body.
Arrrgh! More than 70% of the world’s pirated goods come from China.
COMPLAINTS DEPT.
Just a page of people whining about this and that.
“Insincere people compliment you, but they don’t mean it. The worst was Ray Charles. He said he liked my dress.”
—Joan Rivers
“The Pope is single, too. You don’t hear people saying he has commitment problems.”
—Garry Shandling
“You want me to be great, but you don’t ever want me to say I’m great.”
—Kanye West
“Girls scream for Edward, not Robert. I still can’t get a date.”
—Robert Pattinson, who played Edward in Twilight
“I can’t stand when people say, ‘Don’t hate me because I'm beautiful.’ OK, how about I hate you because you said that?”
—Tia Carrere
“Sometimes I’m so sweet even I can’t stand it.”
—Julie Andrews
“Moses dragged us through the desert to the one place in the Middle East where there’s no oil.”
—Golda Meir
“Abstract art? A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.”
—Al Capp
“There’s no such thing as soy milk. It’s soy juice.”
—Lewis Black
“Just standing around looking beautiful is so boring, really boring, so boring.”
—Michelle Pfeiffer
“You know why the French hate us? Thay gave us the croissant. And you know what we did with it? We turned it into a croissandwich.”
—Denis Leary
“It is clearly stated in Article 5 of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights that ‘No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment.’”
—Lindsay Lohan, on being sentenced to 90 days in jail
“The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.”
—Randall Jarrell
The photographic effect called “red-eye” is most visib
le in people with blue eyes.
THE WORST MOVIE
OF ALL TIME?
If you’re a fan of cheesy films like Manos: The Hands of Fate, Plan 9 from Outer Space, and Troll 2, you’ll love this one. Uncle John saw it last year when our local Bad Film Society screened it, and as he was watching, it occurred to him that it actually gave new meaning to the word “bad.” (But somehow he couldn’t stop talking about how great it was.)
THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN
In June 2003, a film called The Room premiered in a handful of Los Angeles theaters. It’s the story of a love triangle between Johnny, a banker; Lisa, his girlfriend; and Johnny’s best friend Mark. The film was the brainchild of Tommy Wiseau, the actor who plays Johnny. Wiseau also wrote, directed, produced, and distributed the film. He financed The Room, too, shelling out $6 million of his own money to make it, plus thousands more on print and TV ads and a single giant billboard overlooking busy Highland Avenue in Los Angeles.
The Room was Wiseau’s first feature film. He hoped to use it to launch a Hollywood career…but all he succeeded in doing was blowing $6 million in record time. The Room played to nearly empty theaters for just two weeks before it was yanked from the screen; in that time it grossed only $1,900, not enough to cover even one month’s rent on the Highland Avenue billboard. Put another way, for every million Wiseau spent, The Room earned less than $320, making it one of the worst box-office flops in history.
CITIZEN PAIN
Is there anything about The Room that isn’t bad? The acting is stunningly incompetent—none of the actors had ever had a major film role before, and Wiseau was incapable of providing decent direction. And the love scene between Johnny and Lisa is creepy (picture a Troll doll having its way with a seat cushion, except that Lisa is the cushion). Wiseau recycles the footage in a second love scene 20 minutes after the first, so you get to watch it twice.
As a screenwriter, Wiseau was even worse. New characters appear out of nowhere and aren’t properly identified, so it’s never clear who they are. A number of subplots—such as drug abuse, unrequited love, and bad real estate deals—are introduced, then quickly abandoned. (“I got the results of the test back. I definitely have breast cancer,” Lisa’s mother tells her, and the subject never comes up again.) And though the thickly-accented Wiseau refuses to this day to say where he comes from, English is clearly not his first language. The Room is full of clunky, confusing, and unintentionally funny dialog: When a (never-identified) character catches Lisa and Mark kissing at Johnny’s birthday party and confronts them, Mark yells, “Leave your stupid comments in your pocket!”
Odds of a Civil War soldier dying in the war: 1 in 6.
PATRON ZERO
The movie likely would have died a quick and unmourned death had an aspiring young screenwriter named Michael Rousselet not happened to see the film near the end of its two-week theatrical run. As Rousselet sat alone in the empty theater, he was stunned by what he saw—bad lighting, out-of-focus scenes, dubbed dialog out of sync with the lip movements onscreen, poorly designed sets (it’s never clear which room is the room, or why the room is so important), one wooden, sophomoric acting performance after another, and much, much more. Whenever Rousselet thought The Room had given all that it had to give, it would cough up some wonderful new chunk of mediocrity and incompetence for him to savor. It was unlike any film he’d ever seen. Sure that such a flop would never make it onto DVD, Rousselet sat in the empty theater (while the movie was still running) and called everyone he could think of on his cell phone, telling them they had to see The Room for themselves before it vanished forever.
MISERY LOVES COMPANY
That theater didn’t stay empty for long. Though The Room died at every other venue where it was shown, Rousselet’s promotional work paid off at this one. A small crowd of friends joined him at the next showing, and as these people phoned their friends, the numbers grew steadily at each remaining screening. “We saw it four times in three days, and on the last day I had over 100 people there,” he told Entertainment Weekly in 2008.
By the time The Room ended its theatrical run, a small but dedicated fan base had already begun e-mailing Wiseau to thank him for his efforts and ask him to screen the film again. Wiseau received dozens more e-mails in the months that followed, and in June 2004 he booked a small theater in West Hollywood for a single midnight screening. That event was a hit—so many people turned out to see the film that Wiseau booked another midnight showing a month later, then another, and then another.
The Romans had heated swimming pools as far back as 1 B.C.
As the crowds continued to grow like lookie-loos at a traffic accident, he expanded to two screens at the multiplex, then three, then four, and then five. Strong word of mouth among a steadily growing fan base of “Roomies,” as they call themselves, led Wiseau to schedule screenings in cities up and down the West Coast, then in other parts of United States and Canada, and eventually in Great Britain. And with foreign-language editions reportedly in the works, The Room may soon have fans all over the world.
SPOONING
Have you ever been to a showing of the 1975 film The Rocky Horror Picture Show? As was the case with that cult film, The Room’s fans have created audience participation rituals all their own. Roomies attend screenings dressed as their favorite characters, shout out their favorite bad lines at the appropriate moments, yell “FOCUS!” during blurry scenes, march out “in protest” during the troll doll/seat cushion love scenes, and throw plastic spoons whenever the spoon photograph in Johnny’s apartment appears. There’s no question that the Roomies are there to laugh at Wiseau and his masterpiece, but he says he doesn’t mind. “As long as they laugh or enjoy themselves, I enjoy with them,” he says.
NO ROOM AT THE ROOM
If you’re ever in L.A. on the last Saturday of the month, go see The Room. Buy your tickets early—even when the film is being shown on five screens, The Room sells out quickly, especially when Wiseau or other stars appear in person. Wisseau’s fabulous flop has been reborn as the hottest cult film phenomenon in decades, and at an estimated gross of more than $1,000 per screening, The Room is on track to break even sometime in the year 2504, maybe sooner if you consider the profits from The Room T-shirts, CDs, DVDs, movie posters, and talking Johnny bobblehead dolls.
Bun fact: McDonald’s uses 2,500 tons of sesame seeds per year.
MODERN WORDS…NOT!
Here are a few terms that you might think were recent additions to English, but have actually been in the language for quite some time.
POLITICALLY CORRECT: Dates back to a 1793 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Chisholm v. Georgia. Justice James Wilson wrote that the people, not the states, held the real power in the country: “To ‘The United States’ instead of to the ‘People of the United States’ is the toast given. This is not politically correct.”
SMASH HIT: The entertainment trade magazine Variety began using this accolade to describe a successful movie in the 1920s.
SPORK: The term for a spoon/fork has been around since at least 1909, when it appeared as an entry in the Century Dictionary. The utensil itself has been in use since the mid-1800s.
BUNK: This word for “empty talk” or “nonsense” originated in 1820 when Congressman Felix Walker, who was from Buncombe, North Carolina, talked at length about whether Missouri should be admitted to the Union as a free state or a slave state. Politicians subsequently adopted the phrase “talking from Buncombe.” That was shortened to “bunkum” and finally to “bunk” by humorist George Ade, who wrote in his 1900 book More Fables, “History is more or less bunk.”
TRUTHINESS: Popularized by satirist Stephen Colbert in 2005, it’s been listed in the Oxford English Dictionary since 1824 as an alternate form of “truthfulness.” When told that it was already a word, Colbert retorted, “You don’t look up ‘truthiness’ in a book, you look it up in your gut!”
NOT!: Loudly proclaiming “Not!” at the end of an assertion to negate that assert
ion was popularized in the late 1980s in Saturday Night Live’s “Wayne’s World” sketches, but the joke first gained popularity in the early 1900s by, among others, humorist Ellis Parker Butler, who wrote in Pig is Pigs (1905), “Cert’nly, me dear friend Flannery. Delighted! Not!”
Today 15% of U.S. workers belong to unions, down from over 40% in the 1950s.
THE LOST EXPLORERS:
LUDWIG LEICHHARDT
The third installment in Uncle John’s look at explorers who should have known better than to “boldly go where no one has gone before.”
CRAZY LUDWIG
The Australian Outback is one of the harshest environments on Earth—a sun-blasted wasteland stretching thousands of miles across the continent. That made it one of the great exploration challenges of the 19th century, and the lure of being the first white man to cross the Outback drew adventurers from around the globe. Among them was a quirky German scientist named Ludwig Leichhardt. He came to Australia in 1842 to study the peculiar animals and rock formations of this strange new world, but quickly shifted his focus to exploring the uncharted interior. Leichhardt’s first expedition barely got off the ground—the arrogant, socially awkward Prussian had difficulty finding backers and he spoke little English. Furthermore, he knew nothing about the bush or how to plan an expedition, and didn’t care to learn. He just went.
LUCKY LUDWIG
If some people are just born lucky, Ludwig Leichhardt was one of them. On his first expedition, in 1842, the 29-year-old explorer made his way along 1,500 miles of desert following the northeast coast, filled in some blank spaces on the map, wrote a book about it, and became an overnight sensation. London’s Royal Geographical Society even awarded him a medal. Suddenly the doors to wealthy patrons (and their checkbooks) flew open. Success fueled his ambition, and Leichhardt set his sights on becoming the first European to cross the continent. Many had tried; none had succeeded—yet. On Leichhardt’s first attempt, in 1846, he set out with a small contingent from Brisbane, on the continent’s east-central coast, for Perth, on the west—a distance of about 2,800 miles. They’d traveled about 500 miles before torrential rain, hunger, and malaria sent them limping back to Brisbane. In March 1848, Leichhardt assembled a new team—this time of five European men, two Aboriginal guides, seven horses, 20 mules, and fifty bulls—and again headed west into the interior. He never made it.
Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ Page 43
