8. In Godzilla’s Revenge, released in 1969, Godzilla returns for what purpose?
A)To settle a score with another monster named Gorgo.
B)To show a little kid how to fight bullies.
C)To get revenge on Raymond Burr.
9. In the 1966 epic, Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster, Godzilla fights for the Free World against Red Bamboo, an evil totalitarian group. Their secret weapon is Ebirah. Who is he?
A)A hypnotist who can brainwash Godzilla.
B)A mechanical jellyfish.
C)A giant lobster.
10. In 1969 Godzilla reappeared with Minya. What was special about this new monster?
A)It was Godzilla’s mother.
B)It was Godzilla’s cousin.
C)It was Godzilla’s son.
Strange legacy: Marietta, Ohio, is named after Marie Antoinette.
SILLY BRITISH
VILLAGE NAMES
People often ask how we find the material for our Bathroom Readers. This one was easy—Uncle John was doing some leisurely bathroom reading one morning, checking out the six newspapers he gets, when he found himself laughing at an article in the Wall Street Journal. That led to more research... and now we’ve got enough silly English names to last a lifetime—or at least a sitting. Here are a few dozen of our favorites.
ROADMAP AS COMIC BOOK
“New York has Flushing. Maryland has Boring. Pennsylvania, of course, has Intercourse,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “But probably no territory in the English-speaking world can match Britain’s wealth of ludicrous place names: Crackpot, Dorking, Fattahead, Goonbell, Giggleswick, Nether Poppleton, Wormelow Tump, Yornder Bognie. The litany, which swells with each page of the atlas, sounds like a Monty Python gag.”
For example: According to Chris Longhurst, in Daft Piace Names, you might already have visited...
• Foulbog
• Dull
• Muck
• Mold
• Moss of Barmuckity
• Belchford
• Burpham
• Lickey End
• Spital in the Street
• Bug’s Bottom
• Pratts Botttom
• Slack Bottom
• Iron’s Bottom
• Horsey
• Bunny
• Corney
• Swine Sty
• Pig Street
• Dog Village
• Donkey Town
• Toad’s Mouth
• Maggots End
• Ufton Nervet
• Crazies Hill
• Shootup Hill
• Bat and Ball
• Pity Me
• No Place
• Haltwhistle
• Slaggyford
• Nether Wallop
• Weeford
• Limpley Stoke
• Nempnett
• Thrubwell
• Butcombe
• Bell End
• Great Bulging
• Eggborough
• Ham
• Pill
• Christmas Pie
• Furzedown
• World’s End
Q. How many dimples are there in a regulation golf ball? A. 336.
UPPER AND LOWER
“Over time,” the Wall Street Journal continues, “many villages also have subdivided, with silly consequences: Great Snoring and Little Snoring, Middle Wallop and Nether Wallop, Helions Bumpstead and Steeple Bumpstead, Sheepy Magna (Latin for ‘big’) and Sheepy Parva (Latin for ‘small’). Then there is the English habit of designating ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ ends of villages, which may grow into communities of their own. Optimists, for instance, will feel at home in the hamlet of Upperup—which is reached, appropriately, via High Street.
“‘If the hamlet grows any more, we’ll have to call one end of it Upper Upperup,’ jokes Charles Hadfield, a local historian.”
Other pairs:
* Fetcham and Bookham (too bad there’s no Jail’am)
* Downham and Turnham Green (in West London)
* “Piddles and Puddles, leading to Poole. (Or away from Poole, depending which side you start),” writes Longhurst
* Upper and Lower Peover
HERE AND THERE...
• There’s a river in the south somewhere (Dorset) called the River Piddle,” Longhurst notes in Daft Place Names. “Around it are placed called ‘Puddletown’ and ‘Piddlehampton.’ Don’t know why they get puddle from piddle.” He adds: “And there’s a village by the name of Nasty, to the southeast 272 of Leighton Buzzard. I’ve only been past it (never to it) but the idea of the Nasty Village Pub, Nasty Inn, Nasty Bakery, etc. somehow appeal to me.”
• “Goon” is Cornish for “pasture.” As a result, there are plenty of Goons dotting the English countryside. For example: Goonbell, Goongumpus, Goonearl, Goonown and Gooninnis. “It’s true we have a lot of goons here,” says one resident. “but I’ve never thought of that as funny.
• Regarding the village of Piddle: A funny name? “Not if you live there,” writes the WSJ. “Ian Curthoy’s, a pig farmer in North Piddle, gripes that passersby often pose for snapshots beside signs for the village—usually while piddling. Other travelers steal the signs, a common nuisance in villages with silly names. Asked about the origin of Piddle’s name, Mr. Curthoys replies: ‘It’s a wet place, isn’t it?’ Sloshing through the mud to feed his sows, he smiles, adding: There was a South Piddle once, but it dried up.’”
The word “checkmate” comes from the Persian shah mat, which means “the king is dead.”
• And finally, the town called Ugley. Its most famous civic group: The Ugley Women’s Institute, “a group that meets every month in the Ugley Village Hall and “holds scholarly lectures and afternoon teas.” Members have tried to rename it the Women’s Institute of Ugley, but no one pays attention. When the members have to identify their affiliation at conventions, they wind up announcing: “We’re Ugley.”
SILLY NAMES AROUND THE WORLD
From Daft Name Places:
• In Newfoundland, Canada, you can find: Heart’s Content, Heart’s Desire, Heart’s Delight, Tickle Harbour, Come By Chance, Goobies, Little Heart’s Ease, Seldom, St. Jones Within, Sop’s Arm, Sheshatsheits and Toogood Arm.
• “There is a village about half an hour’s train ride north of Tromsoe, Norway, on the way to Bodo, called Hell.”
• In Germany, there are two towns near Munich called Grub and Poing.
• There’s a Bavarian mountain (near Garmisch-Partenkirchen to be precise) known as the Wank. You can even take the Wankbahn to the top.
• In Texas, there’s apparently a place called Myass.
• Reportedly, there’s a road near Tucson, Arizona called the Super-chicken Highway.
...And two useful phrases to learn for your next trip to France:
1. “Excuse me, waiter, but there’s a German Shepherd in my soup.” Pardon, garçon, mais il y a un berger allemand dans mon potage
2. “May I have a manicure with my toast, please?”
Est-ce que je peux faire une manicure avec mon pain grillé, s’il vous plaît?
Camel’s hair brushes are made with squirrel hair. They got their name
THE WORLD’S MOST
POPULAR TWINS
To most people, all twins are fascinating. Here are three sets of twins who are famous as well
CHANG AND ENG BUNKER
Claim to Fame: The original “Siamese twins.”
Background: Chang and Eng—“left” and “right” in Thai—were born at Meklong, Siam (Thailand) on May 11, 1811, permanently attached at the chest by a band of skin. They were discovered by an American sea captain who put them on display in Europe and America—where P. T. Barnum bought out their contract.
The Bunkers became world-famous as “Siamese twins.” They managed to live relatively normal lives, becoming American citizens, marrying (unattached) sisters Adelaide and Sarah Yates in 1864,
and somehow fathering 22 children between them. They spent their entire lives looking for a doctor who’d guarantee they’d both survive an operation to separate them, but never found one. They died hours apart in 1874.
Gossip: Chang and Eng hated each other—and fought constantly. According to an 1874 article in the Philadelphia Medical Times, “Eng was very good-natured, Chang cross and irritable....Chang drank pretty heavily—at times getting drunk; but Eng never drank. They often quarrelled; and, of course, under the circumstances their quarrels were bitter. They sometimes came to blows, and on one occasion came under the jurisdiction of the courts.”
ESTHER PAULINE AND PAULINE FRIEDMAN
Claim to Fame: The most popular advice columnists in America.
Background: Esther Pauline (Eppie) and Pauline Esther (Popo) Friedman were born 17 minutes apart on July 4, 1918, in Sioux City, Iowa. They were inseparable throughout their youth; they dressed identically, double-dated, slept in the same bed until their wedding nights, and married on the same day in a double wedding.
Eppie got her start as Ann Landers in 1955 when she entered and won a Chicago Sun-Times contest to succeed the original Ann Landers. In the first weeks of the column, Eppie mailed some of the Landers column’s letters to California, where Popo apparently helped answer them. But when the Sun-Times editors found out about it, they prohibited her from sending any more letters out of the office. The twins had to stop working together.
from their inventor, whose last name was Keml.
A few weeks later, Popo walked into the office of the San Francisco Chronicle and complained about the paper’s advice columnist. The editor gave her a stack of past columns and told her to fill in her own answers. She did—and the editor hired her the next day. Popo chose Abigail Van Buren as her pen name (from President Martin Van Buren), and her column became Dear Abby.
Gossip: When Eppie found out about her sister’s column, she was furious. “I got into this work first,” she told a reporter. “She saw what a great time I was having. And she got into it. I felt it was mine, something that I did. It was a serious problem.” They didn’t speak to each other for 8 years, but eventually buried the hatchet.
JOAN AND JANE BOYD
Claim to Fame: TV’s first “Doublemint Twins.”
Background: In 1959, the 21-year-old sisters were singing advertising jingles on CBS radio. One day they were asked if they wanted to audition to be the first live Doublemint twins. (Wrigley’s Gum had used illustrated twins since the 1920s.) They were taken to meet the boss—P. K. Wrigley—who hired them on the spot. That was the only time they ever saw him.
The girls became American icons and made Doublemint the #1 gum. But the magic ended in 1963, when Wrigley learned that Joan—recently married—was pregnant...and fired them. (Their contract prohibited pregnancy, even within marriage.) Since then there have been more than 20 different sets of Doublemint twins—but none as popular as the originals.
Gossip: Wrigley never gave the twins free gum—even though fans were always walking up to them and asking for it. “We never got a free pack of chewing gum in our lives,” Jane remembers. “So we’d buy our own gum to give to people on the street.” They were also never allowed to chew gum in their commercials. According to Joan, “We were told that Mr. Wrigley had said, ‘I never want to see gum in the mouths of the Doublemint Twins. My girls do not chew gum on-camera.’”
The write stuff: Famous storyteller Hans Christian Anderson couldn’t spell.
FAMILIAR NAMES
Some people become famous because their names become commonly associated with an item or activity. You know the names, now here are the people.
Andre Marie Ampere. A 19th-century French physicist. His work on electricity and magnetism “laid the groundwork for modern electrodynamics.” The standard unit of electrical current—the ampere, or amp—was named after him.
Fitzherbert Batty. A Jamaican lawyer. “In 1839,” writes an English etymologist, “he was certified as insane, which attracted considerable interest in London.” His surname became “an affectionate euphemism to describe someone who is harmlessly insane.”
William Beukel. A 14th-century Dutchman. Invented the process “by which we shrink and sour cucumbers.” The result was originally called a beckel or pekel, after him. It eventually became known as a pickle.
Mr. Doily (or Doyley). A 17th-century London merchant whose first name has been forgotten. “He became prosperous,” says Webster’s Dictionary, “by selling various summer fabrics trimmed with embroidery or crochet work, and, being a good businessman, used up the remnants by making ornamental mats for the table called doilies.”
Hans Geiger. German physicist. In 1920 he perfected a device for measuring radioactivity—the Geiger counter.
John Mcintosh. A Canadian farmer. In 1796 he found a wild apple tree on his Ontario property and cultivated it. The Mcintosh apple is now America’s favorite variety.
Col. E. G. Booz (or Booze). An 18th-century Philadelphia distiller who sold his Booz Whiskey in log cabin-shaped bottles. His product helped make the Old English term booze (from bouse, “to drink”) slang for alcohol.
Sotheby’s auction house sold a 200-year-old piece of Tibetan cheese for $1,513 in 1993.
Archibald Campbell, the third Duke of Argyll. Powerful Scottish noble in the early 1700s. Had the Campbell clan tartan woven into his argyle socks.
Enoch Bartlett. A 19th-century businessman. Distributed a new kind of pear developed by a Massachusetts farmer. Eventually bought the farm and named the pear after himself.
Brandley, Voorhis, and Day. Owners of an underwear manufacturing company. Known by their initials: BVD’s.
Robert Wilhelm Bunsen. German chemist in the mid-1800s. Invented the gas burner used in chemistry labs.
Lambert de Begue. A monk whose 12th-century followers were wandering mendicants. His name—pronounced beg—became synonymous with his followers’ activities.
Rudolph Boysen. California botanist. In 1923, he successfully crossed blackberries and raspberries to create boysenberries.
Charles F. Richter. A 20th-century American seismologist. In 1935 he came up with a scale for measuring the “amplitude of the seismic waves radiating from the epicenter of an earthquake.” The Richer scale is now used worldwide to understand the magnitude of shock waves.
Thomas “Jim Crow” Rice. A white “blackface” comedian. In 1835 he came up with a typically racist song-and-dance routine that went: “Wheel about, turn about / Do just so / Every time I wheel about / I jump ‘Jim Crow.” For some reason, this phrase came to refer to all discrimination by whites against blacks.
TOTALLY IRRELEVANT FACT
The faces on today’s U.S. banknotes have been unchanged since 1929. No one knows for sure why each coin or banknote ended up with the face it did: according to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, “Records do not reveal the reasons that portraits of certain statesmen were chosen in preference to those of other persons of equal importance and prominence.”
Don’t call me: 66% of Las Vegas phone numbers are unlisted—the most of any U.S. city.
THE GOODYEAR BLIMP
No major sporting event is complete without it. In fact, it’s probably the best-known lighter-than-air ship ever (except maybe the Hindenburg, which is famous for blowing up). Here’s the story of the Goodyear blimp.
In 1809 Charles Goodyear, a hardware merchant from Connecticut, saw that rubber had tremendous commercial potential—but only if it could be made less sticky and would hold a shape better than it already did.
So he obtained a large quantity of latex, and tried mixing it with everything in his desk, cellar, and pantry—including witch hazel, ink, and cream cheese—with no luck. One day he tried mixing rubber with sulfur. Then, while working on something else, he accidentally knocked the sulfurized rubber mixture onto a hot stove. He found that the rubber had changed form: it was no longer sticky and it snapped back to its original shape when stretched. He named the process Vu
lcanizing after Vulcan, the Roman god of fire.
THE GOODYEAR COMPANY
Goodyear didn’t get rich from his discovery—he died penniless in 1860. But when Frank A. Seiberling started a rubber company in Akron, Ohio, in 1898, he decided to name it after the inventor. It’s likely he hoped to profit from the confusion created by having a name similar to another Akron rubber company, B.F. Goodrich.
Goodyear’s first products were bicycle and horse carriage tires, rubber pads for horseshoes, rubber bands, and poker chips. The company produced its first auto tires in 1901, airplane tires in 1909, and, using a Scottish process for rubberized fabric, the skins for airplanes in 1910. (This was back when airplanes were based on kite designs and made mostly of wood and cloth.)
The same rubberized fabric turned out to be useful for lighter-than-air craft, and Goodyear flew its first dirigible in 1922.
THE MILITARY CONNECTION
The military used Goodyear blimps for observation and reconnaissance during World War I and World War II. After World War II, Goodyear bought five of its blimps back from the armed forces. It painted them and began using them for promotional purposes. But the company’s executives didn’t see the value of having blimps. In 1958 they tried to ground the airships permanently, to save the operating and maintenance expenses.
The distance between a Boeing 747’s wingtips is longer than the Wright Brothers’ first flight.
The plan was stalled at the last minute by a plea from Good-year’s publicity director, Robert Lane. To demonstrate the blimps’ worth to the company, he scheduled a six-month marathon tour that sent the airship Mayflower barnstorming the Eastern Seaboard. It generated so much favorable press that the executives were convinced to keep it.
The blimps’ first TV coverage was an Orange Bowl game in the mid-1960s. Now they’re used in about 90 televised events a year. Goodyear doesn’t charge TV networks; the publicity generated makes the free service worthwhile.
BLIMP FACTS
• Each blimp is equipped with a crew of 23, consisting of 5 pilots, 17 support members who work on rotating schedules, and 1 public relations representative. The blimps cruise at a speed of 45 to 50 mph (maximum 65 mph unless there’s a really good wind).
Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader Page 30
