THE TOP TOMATO
Over the past 25 years, Newman’s Own has grown into one of the bestselling salad dressing lines, but also one of the first companies to offer nationally available all-natural—and even organic—products. In addition to dressing and pasta sauce, Newman’s Own makes salsa, popcorn, juice, cookies, cereal, coffee, mints, and pet food.
All of those products have raised more than $200 million in profits. Newman had no idea that the proceeds he’d pledged to charity would amount to so much. True to his word, he (and Hotchner) have given away every penny. While the company is secretive about which charities it funds, it is very vocal about its complete financial support of the Hole in the Wall Gang Camps, summer camps for children with life-threatening illnesses. There are five in the U.S. and two in Europe and it costs nothing for the 13,000 campers who annually attend.
“The embarrassing thing is that the salad dressing is outgrossing my films.”
—Paul Newman
THE RUN FOR THE ROSES AWARD
Empress Josephine
Even in wartime, Napoleon promised her a rose garden.
A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME
Marie-Joseph-Rose de Tascher de la Pagerie—also known as Rose—was born in 1763 on her family’s Martinique sugar plantation, where she acquired her love for gardening. At 14, she was married off to a rich young army officer, the Vicomte Alexandre de Beauharnais, and they moved to Paris. She bore him two children, but he was ashamed of her provincial ways and was so indifferent to her that she eventually obtained a separation. After lingering three more years in Paris, she returned home in 1788, where she remained until until a 1790 slave uprising forced her to return to Paris, now in the throes of the French Revolution.
In spite of their estrangement, her life was endangered when her husband, who’d been serving in the Revolutionary army, fell out of favor and was guillotined in 1794. Joséphine herself was imprisoned, and then released.
ROSES RULE
No longer unsophisticated, Joséphine caught the eye of Napoleon Bonaparte, then a rising young army officer, and they married in 1796. When Josephine paid 325,000 francs for a run-down country house outside of Paris, appropriately named Malmaison or “bad house,” Napoleon was furious. Josephine’s extravagances would continue to put a strain on their marriage as time went on.
Meanwhile, Josephine was tending her garden and filling it with her namesake—roses. Her passion for roses left a floral legacy that lives on in one of the most important rose books ever published and, more importantly, in gardens worldwide.
ROSE RENAISSANCE
Empress Josephine’s passion for gardening was new and unfashionable when she began the garden in 1798. But she was determined to make her gardens both unforgettable and meaningful, and in the 16 years she kept them, she created a kind of “rose renaissance.”
Josephine was growing as many species of plants as she could. She introduced 200 plant species to France including jasmine, camellia, and phlox, as well as dahlias, tree peonies, and magnolias. She ordered plants from the best suppliers and spent as much money as she wanted on them (and was always in debt; when she died, her debts amounted to 2½ million francs). Even while France was at war with England and the continent was under continuous blockade, Josephine bought her plants from the London nursery Kennedy & Lee, persuading Napoleon to issue Mr. Kennedy a passport and papers of safe conduct. The Emperor was so obliging, in fact, that he often brought seeds and plants captured from British ships back home for her, including some new ones discovered by Captain James Cook in Australia.
Mr. Kennedy also assisted the Empress in the plan and layout of her gardens. Josephine’s goal was to bring every rose in existence to the chateau’s garden.
CULTIVATED TASTES
Josephine didn’t simply collect roses; she cultivated them, too. Previously, roses had been grown as an aromatic and medicinal plant; Josephine created interest in growing them for their beauty. Her garden’s reputation ignited an interest in rose growing so strong that by 1815, France had become a leading grower and exporter of roses, and by 1830, there were over 2,500 varieties.
As rose enthusiasts know, the increase in the number of species comes from cross-pollination and seed production. Josephine’s gardener, Monsieur Dupont, gets as much credit as his flower-hungry employer in the craze for rose propagation. Dupont was one of the earliest cultivators of roses from seed, which helped to strengthen certain cultivars.
During Josephine’s residence at Malmaison, Dupont amassed nearly 260 rose species and cultivars. Dupont passed on this legacy to Alexandre Hardy, who took over the Luxembourg Garden in Paris and raised many roses we still grow today, including ‘Mme. Hardy’ and ‘Safrano.’
THE REDOUBTABLE REDOUTÉ
Another of Josephine’s legacies was commissioning Pierre-Joseph Redouté to paint the roses in her collection and hiring leading botanists to describe the plants in accompanying texts. Redouté had been the court painter to Queen Marie-Antoinette, but despite the Revolution, survived to become Josephine’s rose painter. The Empress paid him 180,000 francs per year to catalog her living collection.
Redouté’s work, Les Roses, was completed after Josephine’s death. The three volumes, issued between 1817 and 1824, are among the most important rose books ever published. (Some consider Redouté’s “Blush Noisette” to be the masterpiece of botanical illustration.) It is still used to identify older varieties of roses, and many of the included species can still be found in today’s gardens.
A ROSE IS A ROSE, TO A “ROSE”
By all accounts, Napoleon adored Josephine, but her flirtations, her extravagance, and her inability to bear Napoleon a son strained their marriage, which Napoleon had annulled in 1810.
Joséphine retreated to her private residence at Malmaison. She continued to entertain lavishly, with the emperor paying the bills. After Napoleon’s abdication she won the protection of the Russian emperor Alexander I, but she died soon after.
Napoleon died in exile on Elba in 1812, and Josephine died in 1814, but both they and her children from her first marriage live on in roses that exist in great part due to the Malmaison gardens.
Two roses named “Josephine de Beauharnais” and one named “Empress Josephine” exist, all of which have light pink blossoms and originated in France. “Madness at Corsica/Napoleon” is pink. “Hortense de Beauharnais,” named after Josephine’s daughter, is pink, while “Eugene de Beauharnaise,” after her son, is a mauve-colored climbing rose.
THE COMEBACK AWARD
Cryogenics
The quest for mastering lower temperatures led to some amazing discoveries—
and some people see them as a way to bring life back after death.
CRYOGENICS IN THE OLD DAYS
As early as 1823, scientists were looking at ways to create extreme low temperatures with gases. Two British chemists, Sir Humphry Davy and, later, his assistant Michael Faraday, spent more than two decades—between 1823 and 1845—whipping up a cold concoction involving carbon dioxide, ether, and test tubes.
It’s a complex process to make gases so cold that they liquefy, but they did it, and they managed to get the carbon dioxide to drop down to a temperature of -166°F. In 1877, two French physicists improved on Davy and Faraday’s work—the Frenchmen were able to get oxygen to liquefy. From then on, scientists from European countries spent several decades experimenting with more and more gases, like hydrogen and helium. Today, cryogenics deals with temperatures ranging between -238°F and -459.67°F (absolute zero).
The pursuits of these early cryogenic scientists were not just for fun. It was serious business because many of them considered cryogenics to be the answer to humanity’s greatest mystery—death. Cryogenics didn’t hold all the answers to life after death, but it did, some contended, hold the ability to make death a temporary condition. This is still the prevailing theory of cryogenics: If you can use the technology to freeze a person, maybe you can bring him back later on.
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sp; A CHILL IN THE AIR
People commonly refer to cryogenics as a way to preserve a human body after death, but the correct term when applied to people is “cryonics.” And the real question a person considering cryonics faces is this: If you want to be frozen after death (and by law, you must wait until you have been officially pronounced dead) you must first make a choice—do you want to freeze just your head, or do you want to keep your whole body?
Usually, the deciding factor is money. Freezing just your head will cost about $80,000. Freezing your whole body costs more than $150,000. (There’s also an annual fee for preservation and storage, so many patients set up a trust fund to keep payments up in perpetuity.) The folks who choose to go bodyless presume that when science has advanced enough to bring your head out of the cryonic soup, it will also be far enough along to regrow your missing body.
Those who opt for crynoics are also betting on a few more scientific outcomes: 1) a cure for whatever killed them in the first place; 2) a way to reverse the aging process so they’re not right back in the freezer; and 3) the ability to undo the damage done by the cryonics.
In the least case, that damage could be substantial, so doctors try to stave it off by taking a few steps right after the person has died. The first step, as soon as possible after death has occurred, is for the cryonic scientists to artificially restart the breathing and blood circulation process. Then the cooling process begins. Chemicals called cryopectants are added to (theoretically) prevent the brain from freezing completely. Finally, the body (or head) is placed in a titanium steel vat of liquid nitrogen. From there, the remains are stored, and the next step is to wait . . . and wait.
Cryonics was first performed in 1967—the first person to undergo the procedure was a psychologist named Dr. James Bedford. Over the past four decades, about 100 more people have chosen it.
FAMOUS FACES IN CRYONICS
Companies that practice cryonics are committed to preserving anonymity, so rumors about which celebrities chose the procedure are rampant. But we got the frozen scoop on two of them:
• Walt Disney—the man behind the mouse died in 1966, and ever since then, stories have persisted that his body was cryoni-cally frozen. Some say he’s even lying in liquid nitrogen in the catacombs below Disneyland. Not so. He was cremated.
• Ted Williams—the baseball great died in 2002, and his son hired an Arizona cryonics firm to freeze Williams’s head.
THE PRACTICAL SIDE OF CRYOGENICS
Cryogenics is not just a theoretical method to cheat death. It also has practical applications that humans use today. Here are a few:
• Cryosurgery—using extreme cold to treat disease, doctors are able to fight illness by selectively killing off harmful tissues and cells. It’s been used as treatment for Parkinson’s disease, brain tumors, and cervical cancer.
• Nuclear power—cryogenics is used to keep hydrogen and helium in liquid form, both of which are needed for nuclear fusion.
• Frozen foods—liquid nitrogen cools foods so quickly and completely that it’s the safest way to freeze food immediately. It also keeps the foods frozen while they’re transported to stores.
• Fertilizers—liquid nitrogen is a key ingredient for some fertilizers.
• Space travel—making oxygen a liquid can help to create a breathable atmosphere to be used in space shuttles.
SNOOPY’S SEVEN SIBLINGS
As Snoopy once said, he was born “one bright spring morning at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm.” There were seven other puppies born along with Snoopy that day. The most familiar was Spike, his fedora-wearing and mustached brother from Needles, California. Like pink-hued sister Belle (from Kansas City), Spike can play the violin. Marbles, the smartest of the litter, plays the banjo, and overweight Olaf wins an ugly-dog contest. Andy is the shaggiest; he and Olaf live together on a farm.
The last puppy pair, a boy and a girl, are never named in the strip. But they did get names when they appeared in the 1991 television cartoon, Snoopy’s Family Reunion. Molly and Rover play the dobro and the mandolin.
THE “OUT OF MY CONTROL” AWARD
Bodily Functions
Ah, the body. What a strange and wonderful machine it is.
Sometimes, though, it’s just baffling—or embarrassing.
HICCUPS
When the diaphragm muscle contracts involuntary, you’ve got the hiccups. The diaphragm is the muscle you use to breathe—it contracts to pull in air and expands to expel your exhalations. No one knows exactly why it spasms and contracts involuntarily. But when it does, it causes you to make an embarrassing noise that’s caused by the quick closing of the opening between the vocal chords. In the vast majority of cases, hiccups last only a few minutes and aren’t serious. But consider this: some hiccups cases can last for days, weeks, or even years and can be the result of serious afflictions, like pneumonia or kidney failure.
BRAIN FREEZE
It’s hard to say no to a scoop of ice cream, but knowledgeable eaters know to fear the brain freeze—the quick headache that comes from eating cold food too fast. When something freezing cold touches the roof of the mouth, it sets off a chain reaction in the nerves of the head. The blood vessels immediately begin to contract to hold blood in, and then they swell, releasing a relatively large stampede of blood. And there you go . . . brain freeze. For most people, the brain freeze is gone within 60 seconds, but sometimes it can last up to five minutes. Ice cream and other cold treats may be worth the temporary pain, but still . . . slow down and chill—or drink something warm. That can help too.
SLEEPING FEET
Feet, don’t fail me now . . . whoops, they already did. Sitting too long in a way that cuts off circulation also cuts off communication between the nerves and the brain. The signals between the two get all jumbled, creating that all too familiar tingling feeling. Any part of the body, not just feet, can be affected by this, and the tingling sensation acts as a warning to switch positions to prevent doing any damage. Most people who move are back to normal within a few seconds (though it can take several moments for the nerves to return to normal and start sending out their regular messages). But beware of the condition known as Saturday Night Palsy: Intoxication (or some other condition) can put the body into a deep slumber, and people have been known to sleep right through the nerves’ desperate messages to get up and move. In those rare case, it can takes days or even months to undo the damage. Something to think about when you’re sitting for too long.
BELCHES
Ah, gas. The world would be a much duller place without it. And there’s no getting around it, really. When you eat, you use the same mouth that you breathe with, and you can’t help but take in air with your dinner. That air gets in the stomach and doesn’t really have anywhere to go but back the way it came. It travels up through the esophagus and makes its rude little reentrance into the world. If burps really bother you, just be glad you don’t have to hang around Brit Paul Hunn. He’s in the Guinness World Records for having the loudest belch—118.1 decibels, about as loud as an airplane taking off.
FARTS
Ah, gas . . . oh, wait, we already said that. Well, it’s still true. There’s no shortage of gas in the body. The aforementioned oxygen that creeps into the stomach is one, and there are also blood gases and gases produced by bacteria inside the body. So much gas, in fact, that sometimes it just has to get out. And if it doesn’t go out through the mouth, there’s really only one other way it can go. The combination of gases produced are different depending on what you’ve eaten and what bacteria are inside your body, but the smell is usually from sulfur compounds. Oh, and beans may make you toot, but it turns out they’re not very sulfuric, so discharges caused by them won’t smell as bad. Something to chew on.
THE BATHROOM ACCESSORY AWARD
Rubber Ducky
On water or land, here’s why a rubber duck is always welcome.
A TOY WITH STAYING POWER
No citation exists for the first rubber duck, b
ut they’ve been around since at least the early 1800s, when they were hard and nonsqueaking rubber toys. Today, they’re big business, and though they’ve retained the name “rubber ducks” since the 1950s, nowadays these bath-time playthings are made mostly of plastic.
Rubber ducks have always been fun toys, but since the 1970s, they’ve become an obsession for some. Ernie on Sesame Street was “awfully fond” of his, but some people take collecting to an extreme, amassing them by the hundreds and even thousands. Charlotte Lee of Santa Monica, California, holds the current world record in rubber duck collecting—she’s amassed more than 2,600 of the little guys over the years. (That’s a lot more than the few dozen that sit on our widowsills here at the BRI.)
ON YOUR MARK, GET SET . . . QUACK!
Every year, thousands of people participate in rubber duck races around the country. The largest, the Derby Duck Races, is held exclusively for charity. The first such race was in 1988, the brainchild of Eric Schechter, president of Great American Merchandising and Events (GAME). Since then, the races have raised over $140 million, and continue to raise more than $10 million per year. That’s a lot of ducks—and bucks.
CREATIVE CANARDS
In 2007, an outdoor art exhibit in France called “Loire Estuary 2007” provided an opportunity for Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman to create one of the biggest rubber ducks on record—80 feet high! Hofman extolled the healing virtues of his “Canard de Bain,” saying the giant mallard did not discriminate, did not have political views, and was basically just good for the soul to look at. The duck floated in the Loire River until the exhibit closed in September 2007.
Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Golden Plunger Awards Page 35
