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“Just remember, once you’re over the hill you begin to pick up speed.”
—Charles Schulz
Novelist Ken Kesey faked his own suicide to avoid arrest for a marijuana charge in 1965.
ANY RELATION?
Genealogist Mark Humphrys traced his family tree back 1,000 years. Along the way he found these famous people who are all descended from royalty.
Monarch: Louis IV, King of the Franks (920–954)
Descendants: Authors Louisa May Alcott (Little Women) and L. Frank Baum (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz); actors Katharine Hepburn and Anthony Perkins (Psycho)
Monarch: Hugh Capet, the first person to be called “King of France” (938–996)
Descendants: U.S. presidents Rutherford B. Hayes, Franklin D. Roosevelt, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush
Monarch: Otto II, Holy Roman Emperor (955–983)
Descendants: Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), novelist Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)
Monarch: Vlad the Impaler, (1431–1376) the Transylvanian prince said to be the inspiration for Count Dracula
Descendant: Actor Robert Pattinson, who played the vampire Edward in the Twilight movies
Monarch: Henry I of England (1069–1135)
Descendants: Nancy Reagan, actress Sigourney Weaver, Bill Gates, politician Mike Huckabee, actor Clint Eastwood
Monarch: William the Conquerer, King of England (1027–1087)
Descendant: French impressionist painter Edouard Manet
Monarch: Alfonso VII of Castile and Léon (now Spain), (1105–1157)
Descendant: Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevara
Monarch: Philip II of France (1165–1223)
Descendants: Former Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien, singer Celine Dion, and actress Angelina Jolie
Monarch: Charlemagne (747–814), the King of Franks and Holy Roman Emperor
Descendants: Every other person on this page
A dark-chocolate bar contains around 12 grams of sugar. A glass of orange juice: 22.
BIRD BRAINS
These quotes are for the birds. (Well, they’re about them, at least.)
“There’s an unseen force which lets birds know when you’ve just washed your car.”
—Denis Norden
“Much talking is the cause of danger. Silence is the means of avoiding misfortune. The talkative parrot is shut up in a cage. Other birds, without speech, fly freely.”
—Saskya Pandita
“There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.”
—Robert Lynd
“I hope you love birds. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.”
—Emily Dickinson
“A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.”
—Chinese proverb
“Everyone wants to understand painting. Why is there no attempt to understand the song of the birds?”
—Pablo Picasso
“Birds scream at the top of their lungs in horrified hellish rage every morning at daybreak to warn us all of the truth. But sadly we don’t speak bird.”
—Kurt Cobain
“When birds burp, it must taste like bugs.”
—Calvin, Calvin and Hobbes
“Birds know themselves not to be at the center of anything, but at the margins of everything.”
—Gregory Maguire
“Always behave like a duck—keep calm and unruffled on the surface but paddle like the devil underneath.”
—Jacob Braude
“I don’t ask for the meaning of the song of a bird, or the rising of the sun on a misty morning. There they are, and they are beautiful.”
—Pete Hamill
“Eagles may soar, but weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines.”
—John Benfield
The word “mouse” is from the ancient Sanskrit word mus, meaning “thief.”
ME: THE MOVIE
Why hire actors to play famous people when they are more than willing to play themselves?
Movie: Viva Knievel! (1977)
Starring: Evel Knievel
Details: In the 1970s, daredevil Evel Knievel was a one-man thrill show and a marketing genius, announcing months ahead of time the next seemingly impossible jump he planned to make on his red-white-and-blue motorcycle—over a row of buses or across Snake River Canyon, for example. Knievel TV specials attracted millions, and kids couldn’t wait to buy Evel Knievel action figures and toy motorcycles. Part of the cultural phenomenon was the 1977 movie Viva Knievel!, starring Evel Knievel as himself. The plot: Knievel is planning a tremendous jump in Mexico, but there’s a nefarious plan to kill him, masterminded by a drug lord played by Leslie Nielsen. Knievel saves the day, and he even inspires a crippled orphan to walk. (Really.)
Movie: Tears and Laughter (1994)
Starring: Joan and Melissa Rivers
Details: Joan Rivers was one of the first women to make it in the male-dominated field of stand-up comedy. She and husband Edgar Rosenberg had a daughter, Melissa, who made a career in show business hosting TV specials and occasionally acting. In 1987 Rosenberg, suffering from depression, took his own life. Seven years later, this story was sold as a made-for-TV movie. Joan and Melissa, at that point best known for hawking jewelry on home shopping channels, starred as themselves, reliving the tragedy of Rosenberg’s death.
Movie:The Jackie Robinson Story (1950)
Starring: Jackie Robinson
Details: An important figure in history, sports, and civil rights, Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947, enduring the open racial hostility of players and the public. But in addition to great fortitude, Robinson had great skills. He was an excellent ballplayer, winning a Rookie of the Year award, an MVP award, a World Series, and starting spots on six All-Star teams. It would make a good movie, wouldn’t it? That’s what Hollywood thought…except that there were no major African-American movie stars to play him. So Robinson played himself. The Jackie Robinson Story told his life story—discovering baseball as a child, being spurned as a young man despite his abilities, and finally, breaking into the majors. It ends with Robinson, as Robinson, giving a stirring speech to Congress.
Westinghouse released the first color TV in 1953. Cost: $1,250 (about $10,000 today).
Movie:The Greatest (1977)
Starring: Muhammad Ali
Details: Will Smith played him in 2001’s Ali, but at his peak, Ali was so relentlessly self-promoting that no one could have played him except Ali himself. Based on his autobiography, The Greatest covers the 14 biggest years in Ali’s life, from his gold-medal win in the 1960 Olympics to 1974’s “Rumble in the Jungle,” when he defeated George Foreman in Zaire. The film also has a few real actors—James Earl Jones as Malcolm X, Roger Mosley as Sonny Liston, Ernest Borgnine as Angelo Dundee—and features archival footage of his boxing matches. And it’s the source of what would become Whitney Houston’s signature song, “The Greatest Love of All,” originally written and sung by George Benson for this movie.
Movie:The Ann Jillian Story (1988)
Starring: Ann Jillian
Details: Jillian was a mainstay of forgettable 1980s television, starring in the sitcoms Jennifer Slept Here (as a flirty ghost) and It’s a Living (as a flirty waitress), on Bob Hope specials, and in more than a dozen made-for-TV movies. Jillian’s career came to a sudden halt in 1986 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She underwent a double mastectomy, beat cancer, and returned to work in made-for-TV movies. Her first role: The Ann Jillian Story, which dramatizes how she struggled to win parts on TV and Broadway, how she rose to stardom, how she met her husband (a cop), and how she dealt with and beat cancer. She also sang the theme song. Happy ending: Jillian won a Golden Globe for her performance.
Official name of Mexico: Estados Unidos Mexicanos (United Mexican States).
THE SMARTP
HONE AUTOCORRECT QUIZ
It can be annoying (and amusing) when a smartphone’s autocorrect feature “corrects” misspelled words. We typed some famous names into an iPhone…and got these. Can you tell who they are? (Answers on page 600.)
1) Bigfoot Mittens (actor)
2) Eerily Legalese (TV chef)
3) Bonus Wager (baseball legend)
4) Stockyard Canning (actress)
5) Ravens-Gnome (Disney star)
6) Skiing Leprous (actor)
7) Beyond Knowing (singer)
8) Matt Frowning (cartoonist)
9) Dark Nitwit (NBA star)
10) Marissa Jar Gutsy (actress)
11) Kiss Sheldon (creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
12) Sweet Ill Zappity (musician and rock star progeny)
13) Even Knives (daredevil)
14) Tipsy Shamir (rapper)
15) Care Blanket (actress)
16) Favorite Siding (actress)
17) Gerald Departure (actor)
18) Latent Nester (star of Gossip Girl)
19) Sits Von Reese (burlesque performer)
20) Bounteous Bounteous Gal (diplomat)
21) Zachary Halifax (actor)
22) Bing Thames (actor)
23) Chance Billions (NBA star)
24) Mikey Chris (singer)
25) Humid Hemstitcher (’60s rock star)
26) Alligator Cookie (Former Masterpiece Theater host)
Only U.S. pres. to work in a national park: Gerald Ford, in Yellowstone. (Park ranger, ’36).
HEY, JAY! PAY FAY WRAY. TODAY, OKAY?
Word origins in the key of “AY.”
BAY: The Latin baia meant “open out,” as a bay opens out to the sea. The word may have come from an ancient spa on the Bay of Naples called Baiae. It entered English in the late 1300s as baye.
BRAY: The donkey’s call is from the Old Irish braigid, which means “break wind.”
CLAY: This word predates Latin to an ancient language known as Proto-Indo-European (PIE), where it first showed up as the root glei-, meaning “stick together,” like glue—a word that comes from the same root.
DAY: From the Old English dæg, which comes from the PIE dhegh, for “burn.” Day only meant “daylight hours” until the 1750s, when solar day was coined.
(INTO THE) FRAY: This term for a fight or brawl comes from Middle English affray (14th century), which also gave us the word afraid.
GAY: Entered English in the 1300s from the Middle-French word gai (“joyful, laughing”). Linguists trace its homosexual meaning to the late-1800s slang term gaycat: “a young hobo who latches onto an older hobo to learn the ropes.” In the late 1960s, gay rights activists claimed the term.
GRAY: It entered English in the 700s as græg. In Great Britain, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia, it’s spelled grey. However, starting in the 1820s, gray became the preferred American spelling (although “greyhound” always has an “e”).
HEY: The “hello” meaning only dates to the 19th-century American South, but nearly every language has a similar interjection to express surprise. The Greeks cried eia!; the Romans, eho!
The average American goes to the movies about 5 times a year. The average Japanese: once.
JAY: Comes from the Latin gaius, meaning “full of joy.” To the Romans, that’s what the squawks of these blue-feathered members of the crow family sounded like.
PAY: The Latin pax (“peace”) became pacare, which meant “to pacify a debtor to keep the peace.” In the 1300s, it came to English as payen.
PLAY: Comes from the Dutch pleien, meaning “dance, leap for joy, and rejoice.”
PRAY: From the PIE root prek-, the word showed up in ancient Rome as precari, meaning “to ask earnestly, to beg.” (It’s also the root of precarious, because when you beg, you’re put in a precarious position.)
PREY: Both prey and predator come from the Latin verb prædari, which means “to rob, to plunder.”
RAY: Derived from the Latin radius, meaning “rod, spoke” (like a sunray), it entered English in the 14th century from the Anglo-French rai.
SPRAY: From the Middle Dutch sprayen, “a jet of water.”
STAY: From the PIE root sta-, which meant “stand.” Until the 1400s, stay meant “stop,” as in “come to a halt,” before taking on the added meaning of “remain where you are.”
STRAY: The Latin estree (“street”) became the Old French verb estraier (“to wander about the street”), and strayed into English in the 1300s.
WAY: From yet another PIE word, wegh, which meant “road,” or “path.” It was in use in Old English as early as the 700s as weg. The phrase a-weg gave us the word away.
WEIGH: Also from the PIE word wegh, in this sense “to move.” Old English added the meaning “to lift” and then to “measure how much is being lifted.” Weigh took on the figurative meaning “to ponder” in the 14th century.
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“Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza.”
—Dave Barry
World’s most expensive wedding: Prince Charles and Lady Diana ($48 million in 1981).
THE REAL SCROOGE
One of the hallmarks of the work of 19th-century author Charles Dickens is his oddball characters and their fanciful names: Uriah Heep, Martin Chuzzlewit, Lady Honorie Dedlock, Pip Pirrip, Abel Magwich, Miss LaCreevy, and Bardle the Beadle, to name a few. Perhaps Dickens’s best-known character is Ebenezer Scrooge, from A Christmas Carol—who, it turns out, was inspired by a real person.
THE MISER
John Elwes (1714–1789) was born John Meggot. He was orphaned at an early age. His father, a wealthy London brewer named Robert Meggot, died when the boy was only four. His mother, Amy Elwes, followed not too long afterward. When she died, the family fortune, an estimated £100,000 (about $29 million today), passed to her son.
John was educated at the Westminster School, an exclusive boarding school at Westminster Abbey in London. He spent more than a decade there, then lived in Switzerland for a few years before returning to England. When he was in his twenties and thirties, Meggot gave little hint of the man he would become. He dressed well, spent money freely, and moved among London’s most fashionable circles. He developed a taste for French wines and fine dining. He was a skilled horseman and fox hunter, and he had a passion for gambling—he bet, and often lost, thousands of pounds in card games.
THE FAMILY WAY
Unfortunately for Meggot, hoarding money seems to have run in the family, at least on his mother’s side. If contemporary accounts are to be believed, Amy Elwes went to her early grave because she refused to dip into the family fortune to buy food, and literally starved herself to death. Her brother, Harvey, was a miser in his own right. He lived on a country estate inherited from his father’s side of the family, and though he would grow his inheritance to more than £250,000 ($72 million), he allowed the estate itself to fall to ruin. The manor house’s roof leaked, and rainwater stained the crumbling, mildewed walls. Broken windows were “repaired” with paper, and the furniture was infested with worms.
Parkfield, CA, the “earthquake capital of the world,” has a bridge spanning 2 tectonic plates.
Rather than buy his own clothes, Uncle Harvey wore the old clothes of the dead relative who left him his fortune. And like his sister, he hated buying food; he spent his days wandering the estate hunting partridges and small game that he could eat for free. On cold evenings he kept warm by pacing back and forth in the great hall of his drafty mansion, rather than waste wood in a fire. Too cheap to marry, he lived like a hermit for more than 50 years “to avoid the expense of company.” Not surprisingly, he produced no heirs.
DINNERS WITH UNCLE HARVEY
Since Harvey had no children, John hoped to inherit his uncle’s fortune. That’s why, in 1751, he changed his last name from Meggot to Elwes—to assure his uncle that
the family name would survive him. That’s also why Elwes visited his uncle regularly and pretended to share his miserly ways. But before arriving at his uncle’s estate—where the meals were certain to be meager—he’d drop in on friends and fill up on their food. Then he’d stop at a roadside inn to change out of his fashionable clothes and into the tattered garments he kept for that purpose, and continue on to his uncle’s.
For dinner Elwes and Uncle Harvey ate whatever fish, partridges, or other small game Harvey had managed to kill that day. As they ate they talked about money and how others wasted it. “There they would sit—saving souls!—with a single stick upon the fire and with one glass of wine, occasionally, betwixt them, talking of the extravagance of the times,” Elwes’s friend and biographer Edward Topham wrote. “When evening shut, they would retire to rest—as ‘going to bed saved candle light.’”
THE FAMILY FOOTSTEPS
John’s years of toadying paid off: When Harvey died in September 1763, he left his nephew, now in his late forties, his entire fortune. John Elwes was now worth over £350,000, the equivalent of more than $100 million today. By then Elwes had assumed many of his uncle’s habits, but not all of them. He still had expensive tastes, and as long as someone else paid the bill, he happily indulged them, gorging himself at other people’s tables as he warmed himself for free by their fires. He still loved to gamble huge sums of money in card games, he gladly lent huge sums to friends and associates when asked, no matter how frivolous the purpose. If a borrower defaulted, Elwes never demanded repayment, explaining that “it was impossible to ask a gentleman for money.”
Uncle John's Fully Loaded 25th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (Uncle John's Bathroom Reader) Page 35
