MMM…PIZZA
In May 2009, police responded to a robbery call at an Italian restaurant in Osijek, Croatia. The cops entered and asked the employees which way the suspect went. One of the workers pointed to a man named Ante Baranovic, who was sitting in a booth gobbling up a slice of pizza. “I know I should have run,” he said as the officers arrested him, “but this pizza is good!”
A SIT-DOWN COMEDIAN
“Dogs are gross. They drink out of the toilet. But when you’re going to the bathroom, maybe your dog is thinking, ‘Hey, I drink out of that thing! Why don’t you just go in my dish, save yourself a walk down the hallway.’”
—Garry Shandling
I BURP, THEREFORE I AM
As once said by that famous philosopher, René Descaaaaartes.
CAN’T STOP BURPING YOU. Jean Driscoll, 72, of Chelmsford, England, started burping constantly (and loudly) in 2006…and has been unable to stop ever since. She’s been to several doctors, taken numerous medications, had acupuncture and hypnotherapy, and has even had her digestive tract examined with a tiny camera—but the loud, spontaneous burping won’t stop. “I don’t go out anymore because I’m too embarrassed,” Ms. Driscoll said, “People laugh and stare at me.” At last report, she’s still trying to find a cure.
JAILHOUSE BURP. In February 2010, Thomas Scott Vandegrift of Roanoke, Virginia, filed suit against several police officers for $6 million each—because they beat him up for burping. Vandegrift claims he was physically assaulted by the officers when they misread his acid-reflux-caused burping as deliberate and disrespectful.
SLAP MY BURP UP. Chinese newspapers reported in April 2007 that a man in the northeastern province of Liaoning had tried to cure his constant belching by slapping himself in the face—hard—several times. Good news: He cured his belching. Bad news: He also broke one of his eardrums. His doctors told reporters that people should not try to cure medical problems by slapping themselves in the face.
DRY YOUR BURPS. In June 2007, Frederick Cronin was arrested for drunk driving in Stratham, New Hampshire. He lost his driver’s license but appealed. According to police rules, officers must observe people arrested for drunk driving for 20 minutes before giving them a breathalyzer test. If the person burps during that period, the officer has to start over. Cronin and the arresting officer agreed that Cronin burped during his waiting period, but the officer insisted it wasn’t a real burp—it was a “dry burp.” At a state Department of Motor Vehicles hearing, Cronin argued that it was indeed a “wet” burp and that the police officer had broken the rules. The hearing officer’s ruling: The “gaseous mix that flowed out of Cronin’s mouth had not emanated from his stomach and contained nothing but air.” Cronin the Burparian did not get his license back.
17% of all American restaurants are pizzerias.
EVERY BURP YOU TAKE. In July 2006, Bryan S. Jeanfreau of Natchez, Massachusetts, was issued U.S. Patent Number 7070638 for a Burp Gas Filtering Device. It’s about six inches long and cylindrical, with a large opening at one end and several small openings on the side, near the other end. When you feel a burp coming on and you’re afraid it’s going to be a foul-smelling one, you put the end with the large opening in your mouth, and the gases released with the burp go through a filter of activated charcoal before being released. Bonus: It’s also a pen. (We don’t know why.)
THE WAY WE BURPED. Have you ever wanted to burp, but couldn’t? For some people it’s a lifelong reality. Normally when gases build up in the stomach or the esophagus, the belch reflex allows them to be released through the upper esophageal sphincter (UES), a one-way valve below your voice box that is chiefly used to let food into the esophagus while you eat. (The vibration of the UES is what makes burps sound the way they do.) But for people with a disorder called “dysfunction of the belch reflex,” that valve doesn’t work properly—and they can’t burp. Ever. The condition can cause severe bloating of the stomach and esophagus, and excruciating pain. What causes the disorder is unknown, and so far there is no cure.
TINY BURPLES. Do fish burp? Many fish species have swim bladders, baglike organs that they can fill with air in order to maintain buoyancy at different depths in the water. They can also expel air from the bag, and they do this by belching it out of their gills. You can see little fish burp bubbles when they do.
“I come from a very big family. Nine parents.” —Jim Gaffigan
Besides chicken pox, you can also catch cow pox, swine pox, and monkey pox.
BEHIND THE LOVE SONGS
What’s every songwriter’s favorite topic? Love. Only problem: They can’t seem to agree on love’s true nature. Either it’s strange, it’s all around, it hurts, it’s crazy, or it’s a battlefield. Here are the stories behind some well-known “love” songs.
The Song: “Love Is All Around” (1967)
The Artist: The Troggs
The Story: The Troggs were a British garage-rock band best known for the raw 1966 hit “Wild Thing.” But when Troggs singer Reg Presley saw a Salvation Army band play an old, sentimental folk song on a TV variety show—he can’t remember the song or the show—it inspired him to write a gentle song about love. (Presley claims he wrote it in just a few minutes.) By the end of 1967, “Love Is All Around” had reached the Top 10 in America and the U.K. More than 25 years later, the song became a hit again when the band Wet Wet Wet covered it for the 1994 film Four Weddings and a Funeral, taking it to #1 for 15 weeks. (Presley donated his songwriting royalties from the Wet Wet Wet version to crop-circle research.)
The Song: “Love Is Strange” (1957)
The Artist: Mickey & Sylvia
The Story: In 1956 blues legend and early rock ’n’ roll influence Bo Diddley wrote this blues song about the intricacies and exasperation of being in love. He had to publish it under the name of Ethel Smith (his wife) because of a legal dispute with his record label, Chess Records. Diddley performed and recorded the song, and it was a minor success. But it didn’t register much with the public until it hit #11 as a cover by the married duo Mickey & Sylvia (Mickey Baker and Sylvia Vanderpool), who turned the song into a sexy, purring love duet. The most famous part, the call-and-response portion of Diddley’s song, became a spoken interlude between Mickey and Sylvia. (“How do you call your loverboy?” “I say, ‘Come here, loverboy.’”) The song has been used in a number of movies, including Badlands, Deep Throat, and Dirty Dancing. It was Mickey & Sylvia’s only major hit. Baker returned to session guitar work—he’d played on dozens of classic rock ’n’ roll songs, including “Shake Rattle & Roll” and “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On.” Vanderpool went on to found Sugarhill Records, which released some of the first-ever rap singles in the ’80s, including “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang and “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.
Between 1934 and 1955, there was not a single bank robbery in Hawaii.
The Song: “Love Hurts” (1976)
The Artist: Nazareth
The Story: Boudleaux and Felice Bryant got their first big breaks as songwriters with a series of hits for the Everly Brothers in the early ’60s, including “Bye Bye Love” and “All I Have to Do Is Dream.” In 1960 Boudleaux wrote “Love Hurts,” a familiar “woe is me” country-music heartache song. It wasn’t a single or a hit, but it appeared on the Everly Brothers’ 1961 album A Date With the Everly Brothers. Musicians seemed to love it, though—Roy Orbison, Gram Parsons, and Emmylou Harris all recorded the song. The British hard-rock band Nazareth often played “Love Hurts” for fun during warm-ups and tunings. It was a joke…until they heard Harris’s version and thought it could be a hit for them. Nazareth recorded the song in 1974, and it became their only Top-10 hit in the United States.
The Song: “Love is a Battlefield” (1983)
The Artist: Pat Benatar
The Story: Mike Chapman had been a top-level pop songwriter for years when rock superstar Pat Benatar called in 1982 and asked him to write a song for her. Chapman extended the offer to hi
s protégé, Holly Knight. She played him a three-chord electric guitar riff she’d come up with; Chapman thought the riff was catchy and “very commercial,” but to “make it special,” he thought they should make the lyrics really weird. He came up with “Love Is a Battlefield,” comparing the uncertainty and risk of falling in love and being in love with being bombarded by bombs and bullets in war. They actually wrote it as a ballad, but Benatar sped it up to make it an up-tempo rock song. Appearing on her Live from Earth album, “Love is a Battlefield” peaked at #5 on the pop chart.
Famous foot fact: Dorothy’s ruby slippers were size 5 ½.
The Song: “Crazy in Love” (2003)
The Artist: Beyoncé
The Story: In the summer of 2002, Beyoncé starred in and recorded the theme song for Austin Powers in Goldmember, taking a two-pronged approach to the launch of her solo career after a decade in the R&B group Destiny’s Child. Her debut solo album, Dangerously in Love, was finished and set to be released in October 2002. But when “Hey Goldmember” bombed on the pop chart, and another member of Destiny’s Child, Kelly Rowland, scored a #1 hit with “Dilemma,” Columbia Records decided to delay the release of Dangerously in Love until 2003 in order to focus on Rowland’s success for a bit longer, and to give Beyoncé time to make sure she had a hit the next time. Seeking to add one more track to Dangerously in Love, Beyoncé asked R&B songwriter/producer Rich Harrison to pitch something. He played her a sample of the 1970 Chi-Lites song “Are You My Woman” and accompanied it on the bongos. Beyoncé liked the hook (Harrison had been holding on to it for months, in search of the right project) and asked him to write a song around it…and gave him only two hours to do it. He was up to the challenge. Remembering an offhand comment Beyoncé had made about her harried appearance that day—“I’m looking so crazy right now”—Harrison wrote “Crazy in Love” in less than two hours. Beyoncé recorded it that night (her boyfriend, Jay-Z, came in at 3:00 a.m. and improvised his rapped section) and took it to #1, where it stayed for seven weeks in the summer of 2003, successfully launching her solo career.
The Song: “Love Story” (2008)
The Artist: Taylor Swift
The Story: Swift was 19 when she wrote this song, in tandem with a later hit, “White Horse.” Both are about the same boyfriend, and each expresses a different side of young love—fairy tale romance…and disillusionment. Swift’s inspiration: Romeo and Juliet. Like the play, “Love Story” is about teenage lovers whose parents don’t approve, but her song doesn’t end with suicide—it ends with Romeo asking Juliet’s dad for her hand in marriage. “Love Story” was the first single from Swift’s second album Fearless, which propelled her from country star to pop superstar. The song hit #1 on the country, adult contemporary, and pop charts.
14th-century Chinese emperors used 2-foot-by-3-foot paper sheets as toilet paper.
A HISTORY OF THE
SHOPPING MALL, PART III
Tired of shopping at the mall? Try reading about one instead—it will forever change how you look at malls. (Part II of the story is on page 230.)
NUMBER TWO
Southdale Center, the mall that Victor Gruen designed for Dayton’s department store in the town of Edina, Minnesota, outside of Minneapolis, was only his second shopping center. But it was the very first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping mall in history, and it had many of the features that are still found in modern malls today.
It was “anchored” by two major department stores, Dayton’s and Donaldson’s, which were located at opposite ends of the mall in order to generate foot traffic past the smaller shops in between.
Southdale also had a giant interior atrium called the “Garden Court of Perpetual Spring” in the center of the mall. The atrium was as long as a city block and had a soaring ceiling that was five stories tall at its highest point. Just as he had with the public spaces at Northland, Gruen intended the garden court to be a bustling space with an idealized downtown feel. He filled it with sculptures, murals, a newsstand, a tobacconist, and a Woolworth’s “sidewalk” café. Skylights in the ceiling of the atrium flooded the garden court with natural light; crisscrossing escalators and secondstory skybridges helped create an atmosphere of continuous movement while also attracting shoppers’ attention to the stores on the second level.
GARDEN VARIETY
The mall was climate controlled to keep it at a constant spring-like temperature (hence the “perpetual spring” theme) that would keep people shopping all year round. In the past shopping had always been a seasonal activity in harsh climates like Minnesota’s, where frigid winters could keep shoppers away from stores for months. Not so at Southdale, and Gruen emphasized the point by filling the garden court with orchids and other tropical plants, a 42-foot-tall eucalyptus tree, a goldfish pond, and a giant aviary filled with exotic birds. Such things were rare sights indeed in icy Minnesota, and they gave people one more reason to go to the mall.
Only bone never reported broken in a ski accident: the stapes, found in the inner ear.
INTELLIGENT DESIGN
With 10 acres of shopping surrounded by 70 acres of parking, Southdale was a huge development in its day. Even so, it was intended as merely a retail hub for a much larger planned community, spread out over the 463-acre plot acquired by Dayton’s. Just as the Dayton’s and Donaldson’s department stores served as anchors for the Southdale mall, the mall itself would one day serve as the retail anchor for this much larger development, which as Gruen designed it, would include apartment buildings, single-family homes, schools, office buildings, a hospital, landscaped parks with walking paths, and a lake.
The development was Victor Gruen’s response to the ugly, chaotic suburban sprawl that he had detested since his first visit to Michigan back in 1948. He intended it as a brand-new downtown for the suburb, carefully designed to eliminate sprawl while also solving the problems that poor or nonexistent planning had brought to traditional urban centers like Minneapolis. Such places had evolved gradually and haphazardly over many generations instead of following a single, carefully thought-out master plan.
The idea was to build the Southdale Center mall first. Then, if it was a success, Dayton’s would use the profits to develop the rest of the 463 acres in accordance with Gruen’s plan. And Southdale was a success: Though Dayton’s downtown flagship store did lose some business to the mall when it opened in the fall of 1956, the company’s overall sales rose 60 percent, and the other stores in the mall also flourished.
But the profits generated by the mall were never used to bring the rest of Gruen’s plan to fruition. Ironically, it was the very success of the mall that doomed the rest of the plan.
LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION
Back before the first malls had been built, Gruen and others had assumed that they would cause surrounding land values to drop, or at least not rise very much, on the theory that commercial developers would shy away from building other stores close to such a formidable competitor as a thriving shopping mall. The economic might of the mall, they reasoned, would help to preserve nearby open spaces by making them unsuitable for further commercial development.
Billionaire Warren Buffett filed his first tax return, for a paper route, at age 13. (He claimed a $35 deduction for his bike.)
But the opposite turned out to be the case. Because shopping malls attracted so much traffic, it soon became clear that it made sense to build other developments nearby. Result: The once dirt-cheap real estate around Southdale began to climb rapidly in value. As it did, Dayton’s executives realized they could make a lot of money selling off their remaining parcels of land—much more quickly, with much less risk—than they could by gradually implementing Gruen’s master plan over many years.
From the beginning Gruen had seen the mall as a solution to sprawl, something that would preserve open spaces, not destroy them. But his “solution” had only made the problem worse—malls turned out to be sprawl magnets, not sprawl killers. Any remaining doubts Gruen had wer
e dispelled in the mid-1960s when he made his first visit to Northland Center since its opening a decade earlier. He was stunned by the number of seedy strip malls and other commercial developments that had grown up right around it.
REVERSAL OF FORTUNE
Victor Gruen, the father of the shopping mall, became one of its most outspoken critics. He tried to remake himself as an urban planner, marketing his services to American cities that wanted to make their downtown areas more mall-like, in order to recapture some of the business lost to malls. He drew up massive, ambitious, and very costly plans for remaking Fort Worth, Rochester, Manhattan, Kalamazoo, and even the Iranian capital city of Tehran. Most of his plans called for banning cars from city centers, confining them to ring roads and giant parking structures circling downtown. Unused roadways and parking spaces in the center would then be redeveloped into parks, walkways, outdoor cafés, and other uses. It’s doubtful that any of these pie-in-the-sky projects were ever really politically or financially viable, and none of them made it off the drawing board.
HOMECOMING
In 1968 Gruen closed his architectural practice and moved back to Vienna…where he discovered that the once thriving downtown shops and cafés, which had inspired him to invent the shopping mall in the first place, were now themselves threatened by a new shopping mall that had opened outside the city.
He spent the remaining years of his life writing articles and giving speeches condemning shopping malls as “gigantic shopping machines” and ugly “land-wasting seas of parking.” He attacked developers for shrinking the public, non-profit-generating spaces to a bare minimum. “I refuse to pay alimony for these bastard developments,” Gruen told a London audience in 1978, in a speech titled “The Sad Story of Shopping Centers.”
Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ Page 45
