“I often quote myself; it adds spice to my conversation.”
“Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.”
“When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.”
“A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.”
“A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.”
“I am a gentleman; I live by robbing the poor.”
“England and America are two countries separated by the same language.”
“If all economists were laid end to end they would not reach a conclusion.”
“Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.”
“No man can be a pure specialist without being, in a strict sense, an idiot.”
“There may be some doubt as to who are the best people to have in charge of children, but there can be no doubt that parents are the worst.”
“We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence...on pain of liquidation.”
“The fickleness of the women whom I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.”
“The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.”
“The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.”
“There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.”
They have more to say: 29% of 18 to 24-year-olds talk in their sleep; 9% of people over 50 do.
APRIL FOOLS!
Why is April 1 a “fools’ day”? The most plausible explanation is one we wrote in the first Bathroom Reader: “Until 1564 it was a tradition to begin the New Year with a week of celebration, ending with a big party. But the calendar was different then; the New Year began on March 25, and the biggest party fell on April 1. In 1564 a new calendar made January 1 the New Year. People who forgot—or didn’t realize—what had happened, and still showed up to celebrate on April 1, were called ‘April fools.’” These days, most of the memorable April Fools’ jokes are played by radio and TV stations. Here are a few recent classics.
PASTA FARMING
On April 1, 1966, the BBC broadcast a TV documentary on spaghetti-growing in Italy. Among the film’s highlights: footage of Italian farmers picking market-ready spaghetti from “spaghetti plants.” To the BBC’s astonishment, British viewers accepted the news that Italy’s “pasta farmers” had been able to fight off the “spaghetti weevil, which has been especially destructive recently.”
HE’S BA-A-ACK
In 1992 National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation” news show announced on April 1 that Richard Nixon had entered the race for president. They actually interviewed the “former president” (played by impressionist Rich Little) on the air. “I never did anything wrong,” he announced, “and I won’t ever do it again.” Listeners actually called the show to comment. “Nixon is more trustworthy than Clinton,” one remarked. “Nixon never screwed around with anyone’s wife except his own. And according to some accounts, not even with her.”
GRAVITATIONAL PULL
On April 1, 1976, a famous British astronomer told BBC radio audiences that since the planet Pluto would be passing close to Jupiter on April 1, the Earth’s gravitational pull would decrease slightly for about 24 hours. He explained that listeners would feel the effect most if they jumped into the air at precisely 9:47 a.m. that morning. The BBC switchboard was jammed with listeners calling to say that the experiment had worked.
Gail Borden, inventor of condensed milk, also coined the phrase “Remember the Alamo!”
COLORFUL BROADCAST
In the 1970s, Britain’s Radio Norwich announced on April 1 that it was experimenting with “color radio,” and that the tests would affect the brilliance of tuning lights on radios at home. Some listeners actually reported seeing results: one complained that the experiment had affected the traffic lights in his area; another asked the station managers how much longer the bright colors he saw would be streaming out of his radio.
ANIMAL BEHAVIOR
On April 1, 1992, TV’s Discovery Channel ran a “nature documentary” called “Pet Hates,” actually a spoof of nature films by a British humorist posing as an animal expert. In the film the humorist criticized the animals for their “sexual excesses, appalling sense of hygiene and all-around stupidity”—and denounced them as “sex-crazed, bug-awful, foul-breathed, all-fornicating, all-urinating, disease-ridden, half-wit, furry, four-legged perverts.”
DRIVING PRANK
One year a Paris radio station announced that from April 1 on, all Europe would begin driving on the left. Some drivers actually started driving on the left side of the road. A number of accidents resulted (no fatalities, though).
NEEDLING PEOPLE
In 1989 a Seattle TV station interrupted its regular April 1 broadcast with a report that the city’s famous Space Needle had collapsed, destroying nearby buildings in the fall. The report included fake eyewitness accounts from the scene, which were punctuated with bogus updates from the studio newsroom. The “live” footage was so realistic that viewers jammed 911 lines trying to find out if their loved ones were safe. The station later apologized.
THE JOKE IS RED
Even the media of the former Soviet Union celebrates April Fools’ Day. In 1992 the Moscow press printed stories claiming that gay rights activists had crossed the Atlantic Ocean in condoms, and that the Moscow City Council was planning a second subway system “in the interest of competition.”
Model citizen: President Zachary Taylor never voted in a presidential election.
MYTH AMERICA
A few things you probably didn’t know about the founding fathers who wrote the U.S. Constitution.
THE MYTH: The men who attended the Constitutional Convention in 1787 were a sober, well-behaved group. They showed up on time, stuck it out ’til the end, and were all business when it came to the important task at hand.
THE TRUTH: Not quite. According to historical documents found by researchers at the National Constitution Center in 1992:
• Nineteen of the 74 people chosen to attend the convention never even showed up. (At least one of them had a good excuse, though—William Blount of New York refused to make the horseback ride to Philadelphia because of hemorrhoids.)
• Of the 55 who did show up, only 39 signed the document. Twelve people left early, and 4 others refused to sign. “A lot of them ran out of money and had to leave because they were doing a lot of price gouging here,” observes researcher Terry Brent. Besides, he adds, the hot weather and high humidity must have been murder on the delegates, who wore wool breeches and coats. “They must have felt like dying. Independence Hall must have smelled like a cattle barn.”
• And how did the Founding Fathers unwind during this pivotal moment in our nation’s history? By getting drunk as skunks. One document that survived is the booze bill for a celebration party thrown two days before the Constitution was signed on September 17, 1787. According to the bill, the 55 people at the party drank 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, 8 bottles of whiskey, 22 bottles of port, 8 bottles of cider, 12 bottles of beer, and 7 large bowls of alcoholic punch. “These were really huge punch bowls that ducks could swim in,” Brent reports. “The partiers were also serenaded by 16 musicians. They had to be royally drunk—they signed the Constitution on the 17th. On the 16th, they were probably lying somewhere in the streets of Philadelphia.”
Important first: Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first president to make a hole-in-one in golf.
Q&A:
ASK THE EXPERTS
Everyone’s got a question or two they’d like answered—basic stuff, like “Why is the sky blue?” Here are a few of those questions, with answers from books by some of the nation’s top trivia experts.
H
OLY QUESTION
Q: Why are manhole covers round?
A: “So they can’t be dropped through the manhole itself. Squares, rectangles, ovals, and other shapes could be positioned so they’d slip into the manhole. Round manhole covers rest on a lip that’s smaller than the cover. So the size and shape keeps the manhole cover from falling in.” (From The Book of Answers, by Barbara Berliner)
SHOE TIME
Q: How and why did people start shining their shoes?
A: “A high polish on shoes is a tradition passed down from the Spanish caballero (gentleman on horseback), whose shiny boots served notice that he rode his own horse and didn’t walk along dusty roads with lesser men.” (From Do Elephants Swim?, compiled by Robert M. Jones)
NIPPED IN THE BUD
Q: Why do men have nipples?
A: “Males actually have the anatomical equipment in place to provide milk, but it lies dormant unless stimulated by estrogen, the female hormone. Might men have suckled babies in the distant past? No one knows.” (From Why Do Men Have Nipples, by Katherine Dunn)
PRUNY SKIN
Q: Why does your skin get wrinkled when you soak for a long time in water?
Peeping Tom’s delight: There are 6,500 windows in the Empire State Building.
A: Normally, skin is water-resistant because of a “protective barrier of keratin,” a protein made by the epidermis to keep moisture, bacteria, and other unwanted stuff out. But if skin is immersed in water for a long time, moisture gets through and “the cells in the epidermal layer...absorb water and swell. The enlarged cells cause the skin to pucker and wrinkle.”
Luckily, they don’t stay that way. “Several minutes after toweling off, the water in the skin cells evaporates, and the cells return to their normal shape and size. Otherwise, we would all be walking around looking like the California raisins.” (From The Book of Totally Useless Information, by Don Voorhees)
EGGS-ACTLY!
Q: Why don’t people ever eat turkey eggs?
A: “They don’t taste good. More precisely, they don’t have as much water in them as chicken eggs. The next time you eat a couple of chicken eggs, think about how wet they are. But a turkey egg, if exposed to high heat, turns rubbery.” (From Why Things Are, Volume II, by Joel Achenbach)
HALF-WIT?
Q: Is the old saying true that “we only use 10% of our brains?”
A: “No—you use every part of your brain. Not every area at the same time, of course; they all do different things at different times. At any given moment, only about 5% of your brain cells are actually firing—that is, working. So in one sense this is actually true. But as far as we know, there are no parts that never do anything.” (From Know It All!, by Ed Zotti)
EAT LIKE A BIRD
Q: How do birds find worms underground?
A: “When a bird stands on the ground near a worm that is crawling underneath, it can feel the earth’s vibrations with its very sensitive feet. It will also cock its head to put into operation the low-frequency apparatus of its ears. Then, when it zeroes in on the victim, it pierces the earth with a sudden stab of its beak, grabs the worm, and pulls it out.” (From How Do Flies Walk Upside Down?, by Martin M. Goldwyn)
The biggest state? Alaska is bigger than Texas and California combined.
PEOPLE-WATCHING
It’s scary what behavior experts can predict about us. All it takes is a few studies...and they know more about what we’ll to do in a situation than we do. Following are the results from a few of those studies, including some from The Book of You by Bernard Asbell. Here’s lookin’ at you, kid!
ON NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION...
A variety of factors affect the way we silently communicate with each other.
• For instance, one study shows that if you’ve been told that a person you’re about to meet has a lot in common with you, you’ll actually position yourself physically closer to that person than if you’ve been informed you’re “opposites.”
• According to another study, your nationality plays a role in how “touchy-feely” you are. For instance, over an hour long coffee break in a cafe...
—American friends will touch each other in conversation about twice.
—British friends generally won’t touch each other at all.
—By comparison, the French can’t keep their hands off each other; they average about 110 touches an hour.
—But Puerto Ricans were the most tactile in the study, with about 180 “touches” in the same period.
• Something else to remember, next time you find yourself chatting with someone you don’t know: According to Asbell...
—“If you’re a man, the farther you sit from the other person, (within a range of 2-10 feet), the more willing you are to talk intimately about yourself.”
—“If you’re a woman, the closer you sit together (within a range of 240 feet) the more willing you are to tell intimate details about yourself.”
—“Within that range of 2-10 feet (whether you’re a man or a woman), you’ll talk with a stranger longer and volunteer the most about intimate topics at a distance of 5 feet.”
There are no photographs of Abe Lincoln smiling.
ON GIVING & LIVING...
• Want long life? A recent study of about 2,700 individuals found lower death rates among those who volunteered their time to a favorite charity or cause.
• Another interesting study in behavior had students watch a movie on Mother Teresa. The film depicted her administering to the needy and sick, bringing comfort and solace. Immediately following the film, researchers found in the students, a significant increase in immunoglobulin, an antibody that helps the body fight respiratory infections.
ON ROMANCE & DATING...
• The most common thing we all do when we want to be romantic is say “I love you” to our partner. Sweet...but not as effective as you might think. When people were asked “How you’d want your lover to treat you to romance” in a study, the most common answer was “lying around in front of a fire.”
• Other choices included: “Taking a shower together” and “Walking on the beach.” Ironically, hearing “I love you” came in twelfth.
Other people-watching facts:
• If you’re a man and you get anxious about dating, chances are that male friendships are also cause for anxiety.
• First-date anxiety for a guy almost never centers around sex. It’s usually worry about what to talk about, how to behave, and what to expect.
• First dates are tough for everyone, but if you’re a guy, you’re probably going to be a lot more uptight about the situation than the woman is.
• If it’s any consolation, however, the chances are that if you’re a man—even if you’re uptight about an encounter—you probably like your body more than your date does hers. Studies show that men are generally more likely to see their bodies as attractive to women than woman are to see their bodies as attractive to men.
Thank goodness: “Things are more like they are now than they ever have been.”—President Gerald Ford
One bucket of water can make enough fog to cover 105 square miles in 50 feet of fog.
COLORS
Colors have a lot more impact on our daily lives than you might think. Here are some things researchers have found out about people and color.
BLUE
• Blue has a tranquilizing effect. Bridges are often painted blue to discourage suicide attempts. And according to one report: “When schoolroom walls were changed from orange and white to blue, students’ blood pressure levels dropped and their behavior and learning comprehension soared.”
• Researchers say blue is the #1 color for women’s sweaters, because women think men like it. (They’re right; it’s U.S. men’s favorite color.)
RED
• Red is a stimulant that can cause “restlessness and insomnia” if it’s used in bedrooms.
• According to marketing studies, red makes people oblivious to how much time is pass
ing. That’s why it’s “the color of choice for bars and casinos.”
• Women tend to prefer blue-toned reds, while men like yellowish reds. Businesses keep this in mind. For example: the Ford Mustang, which is targeted to men, is orange-red (called “Arrest-me” red at Ford); the Probe, targeted to women, is offered in more blue-red shades.
GREEN
• Because it reminds people of fields and foliage, green makes us feel secure. Researchers say it’s a good color for bedrooms; and green kitchens reportedly make cooks more creative.
• Studies show that “people working in green environments get less stomachaches than people in areas where other colors predominate.”
YELLOW
• It’s the color most likely to stop traffic...or sell a house.
• But yellow also represents “caution or temporariness—so car rental agencies and taxis use it, but not banks.”
• Too much yellow makes people anxious. “Babies cry more and temperamental people explode more in yellow rooms.”
America’s favorite colors: #1 is blue. Then red, green, white, pink, purple, and orange.
MISS PIGGY
Porcine words of wisdom from one of America’s favorite pigs.
DIET TIPS
“Never eat anything at one sitting that you can’t lift.”
“Always use one of the new—and far more reliable—elastic measuring tapes to check on your waistline.”
ARTICHOKES
“These things are just plain annoying...after all the trouble you go to, you get about as much actual ‘food’ out of eating an artichoke as you would from licking thirty or forty postage stamps. Have the shrimp cocktail instead.”
PERFUME
“Perfume is a subject dear to my heart. I have so many favourites: Arome de Grenouille, Okéfénokée, Eau Contraire, Fume de Ma Tante, Blast du Past, Kermes, Je suis Swell, and Attention S’il Vous Plait, to name but a few.”
Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader Page 28
