Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  COLLIES

  For centuries, collies were common in the Scottish Lowlands, but virtually unknown everywhere else in the world. A working dog used to guard the large flocks of sheep that roamed the area, the collie might still be uncommon today if it hadn’t been for Queen Victoria. She happened to notice some of the dogs outside of Balmoral Castle and was so charmed by them that she brought a few back to London. The British upper classes, quick to take a royal hint, made the collie one of the most popular breeds in the country...and eventually in the world.

  THE MAKECH BEETLE

  A short-lived fad of the 1960s, the “makech” was a gilded and stone-encrusted living beetle that was attached to a pin by a thin gold chain. The wearer attached the pin to their shirt, and let the beetle walk over their shoulder and neck. Phyllis Diller wore a makech emblazoned with gold lace and white seed pearls. “How else,” she asked at the time, “am I going to get ten men standing around looking at my chest?” Not everyone liked the fad. “A makech’s appeal is primarily to the screwball fringe,” said a customs agent in charge of breaking up illegal beetle-smuggling rings. “It takes some kind of nut to wear a bug.”

  California has the most unlisted phone numbers per capita; Florida has the least.

  PIRANHAS

  Another weird pet craze of the 1960s was the piranha. Enterprising pet store owners skirted laws banning importation and possession of the meat-eating fishes, claiming they were actually friendly pets, not the flesh-eating meanies they were reputed to be. “We got very attached to ours,” one owner told reporters about her aquatic carnivore. “He had a personality that most tropical fish don’t seem to have.” But state and federal officials held the line—to date it is still illegal to import or own a piranha. According to one biologist with the California Fish and Game Department, “Piranhas eat people.”

  FAINTING GOATS

  Fainting goats aren’t much different from normal goats...except that they have a genetic trait that causes them to stiffen up and fall over when someone (usually the owner or the owner’s friends) frightens them. Fainting faddists rank their pets’ “skill” on a scale of one to six, with “six being the highest, meaning they lock up most of the time and fall over,” says Kathy Majewski, founder of The American Tennessee Fainting Goat Association (TATFGA).

  First observed in Tennessee in the 1800s, the goats were nearly driven extinct by coyotes, who (for obvious reasons) preferred them to regular goats. But TATFGA was formed to save them.

  The group boasts more than 200 members, but not everyone thinks their motives are pure. “To raise animals with an abnormality for use as entertainment is sick,” says Lisa Landres of the Tennessee Humane Society. “The whole phenomenon is mind-boggling.” She may not have to worry, though—the fad may die out on its own because it gets increasingly harder to scare the goats once they get to know you...which defeats the purpose of owning them in the first place.

  Disappointing news: 40% of M&M’s are brown.

  SWEETENED WITH

  FRUIT JUICE?

  If a label says “100% fruit juice,” it’s a healthy food, right? Not necessarily; someone may be lying to you. This article is adapted from the Nutrition Action Healthletter, published by the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

  BACKGROUND

  The first fruit juice listed on the label of After the Fall’s Georgia Peach 100% Fruit Juice Blend isn’t peach. Raspberries aren’t the first fruit ingredient listed in Polaner’s Raspberry All Fruit Spreadable Fruit, either....And apple isn’t first in Frookie’s Fat Free Apple Spice Cookies.

  Nope. It’s “grape juice concentrate.”

  Some—nobody knows how much—of the “grape” (and “pear” and “apple”) juice concentrate in foods like juices, spreads, and cookies is little more than sugar water. It’s been “stripped” of the flavor, color, and nutrients that were in the fruit. As a result, unsuspecting shoppers end up paying premium prices for “100% fruit juice” or “fruit-juice sweetened” or “no sugar added” foods that are anything but.

  HOW SWEET IT IS

  “Sugar is a great ingredient,” says Rich Worth, president of the cookie maker R. W. Frookies. “It’s white, tasteless, and performs the same every time.” But sugar’s empty calories and unsavory reputation aren’t so great, say many consumers, who refuse to buy foods that contain it. Enter fruit-juice concentrate.

  Fruits contain fructose, glucose, sucrose, and other sugars. So if you crush the fruit and then remove most of the water, you end up with a sweetener that contains many of the nutrients that were in the fruit to begin with.

  But fruit juice concentrate isn’t uniform. A Rome apple, for example, tastes different from a Red Delicious. Concentrate has another unfortunate characteristic: It tastes like the fruit from which it came. And that can be a problem for companies looking for a “natural” sweetener.

  The Pinta was pint-sized: Columbus’s third ship was only 50 feet long.

  “Real fruit-juice concentrate is a pain in the butt,” says Frookies’ Rich Worth. But, he adds, he uses it to sweeten his cookies. Most other companies that make “fruit-juice sweetened” or “100% fruit juice” products told us the same.

  Some of them are lying.

  LIFE ALONG THE STRIP

  “Its lack of color and flavor makes it the ideal blending ingredient where no grape flavor or color is desired, but when the application requires an all-natural sweetener.”

  That’s the way Daystar International describes its “deionized white grape juice concentrate,” which “has been stripped of most acids and minerals characteristic of grape juice, leaving a totally clear concentrate that is practically void of flavor and color.”

  The laboratory director for a concentrate maker, who asked not to be identified, explained that juices are typically “stripped” by passing them through two “ion-exchange” columns.

  In one column the juice’s positively charged minerals are replaced with hydrogen (H) atoms. In the other column the negatively charged acids (and flavor and color compounds) are replaced with molecules of oxygen and hydrogen bound together (OH). The Hs then combine with the OHs to form (you guessed it) [H20].

  “It’s an expensive way to make sugar water,” said the lab director. But to many food companies it’s worth the extra cost, since it allows them to label products “100% juice” or “no sugar added.”

  None of the “strippers” would tell us which companies use their products, and many companies that use fruit juice concentrate either didn’t return our calls or refused to say much of anything when they did. Among them: After the Fall, Apple & Eve, Dole, Tree Top, and Tropicana.

  HIDE AND SEEK

  “There is no methodology to detect modified juices in foods,” explains Joe Soeroni, director of food research at Ocean Spray. “And if you can’t detect it, you can’t say who is and isn’t doing it.”

  Jim Tillotson, director of the Food Policy Institute at Tufts University, offers this tip: “In the supermarket, if I saw white grape, apple, or pear juice concentrate, I’d be suspicious.”

  Only 14% of Americans go to at least one play a year; only 3% go to the opera.

  FAMILIAR PHRASES

  More inside info on the origins of phrases we use every day.

  THE SEAMY SIDE

  Meaning: “The unsavory or worst part.”

  Background: Originally referred to the inside part of a sewed garment: If the garment was turned inside out so that the wrong side was showing, the stitched seams were clearly visible.

  TOP DRAWER

  Meaning: “The best quality.”

  Background: Traditionally, the top drawer of a dresser is the place where jewelry and other valuables are kept.

  ALL OVER BUT THE SHOUTING

  Meaning: “Any situation in which victory is clear before a final decision is reached.”

  Background: Rather than hold formal elections to decide local issues, for centuries in England it was common practice to call an assembly of
townspeople and decide matters with a simple voice vote. The assemblies themselves were known as “shoutings,” and when the outcome of an issue was known before the meeting, the situation was described as all over but the shouting.

  GUM UP THE WORKS

  Meaning: “Screw something up.”

  Background: Believe it or not, the phrase has a pre-industrial inspiration: the red gum or sweet gum tree, which is found in the eastern United States. The early settlers chewed the sticky sap, especially kids, who loved its sweet taste. The only problem: Getting the stuff out of the tree was virtually impossible to do without getting it all over yourself. So was getting it out of your hair and clothes—if you weren’t careful, you could really gum up the works.

  Americans travel 1,144,721,000 miles by air every day.

  TAKE BY STORM

  Meaning: “Make a big impression; become famous or popular virtually overnight.”

  Background: Today’s politicians, movie stars, and war heroes take the world by storm...but the term itself dates back to the days when soldiers took fortified enemy positions by storming them.

  TO BE BESIDE YOURSELF

  Meaning: “Under great emotional stress.”

  Background: The ancient Greeks believed that when a person was under intense pressure, the soul literally left the body and was beside itself. (The word ecstasy has a similar meaning: Its Greek root means “to stand out of.”)

  GET YOUR SEA LEGS

  Meaning: “To adjust to a new situation.”

  Background: The term dates back to the days when sailing ships ruled the high seas: a new sailor was said to have “gotten his sea legs” when he could walk steadily across the deck of a ship in stormy weather.

  TO RUN AMOK

  Meaning: “To behave in a wild, uncontrolled manner.”

  Background: The Malay word for “a person who has gone crazy” is moq. The first English sailors to visit Malaysia associated the word with the occasional insane people they saw there...and brought the word home with them.

  DOUBLEHEADER

  Meaning: “Two baseball games in a single afternoon.”

  Background: The name was borrowed from railroading—a train with two engines on it is also known as a doubleheader.

  FLAG SOMETHING DOWN

  Meaning: “To stop a moving vehicle, usually a taxi cab.”

  Background: Another train term: Railroad employees used to literally flag trains down—they stopped them by waving flags at the engineers.

  On strike: The average American goes bowling 233 times in their lifetime.

  TO TELL THE TRUTH

  Are polygraphs accurate crime-fighting tools...or little more than modern-day witchcraft? You be the judge.

  Police in Radnor, Pennsylvania, interrogated a suspect by placing a metal colander on his head and connecting it with a metal wire to a photocopy machine. The message, “He’s lying,” was placed in the copier and police pressed the copy button each time they believed the suspect wasn’t telling the truth. Believing the ‘lie detector’ was working, the suspect confessed.

  —News of the Weird

  Can we ever really know for sure if someone is telling a lie? Most experts agree that the answer is no—but that hasn’t stopped society from cooking up ways to sort out the liars from the honest people.

  ANCIENT METHODS

  • The Bedouins of the Arabian peninsula forced suspected liars to lick red-hot pokers with their tongues, on the assumption that liars would burn their tongues and truth tellers wouldn’t. The method was primitive and barbaric—but it may have also been accurate, since the procedure measures the moisture content of the suspect’s mouth—and dry mouths are often associated with nervousness caused by lying.

  • The ancient Chinese forced suspected liars to chew a mouthful of rice powder and spit it out; if the rice was still dry, the suspect was deemed guilty.

  • The ancient British used a similar trick: they fed suspects a large ‘trial slice’ of bread and cheese, and watched to see if he could swallow it. If a suspect’s mouth was too dry to swallow, he was declared a liar and punished.

  • The preferred method in India was to send the suspects into a dark room and have them pull on the tail of a sacred donkey, which was supposed to bray if the person was dishonest...at least that’s what the suspects thought. The way the system really worked was that the investigators dusted the donkey’s tail with black powder (which was impossible to see in the unlit room). Innocent people, the investigators reasoned, would pull the tail without hesitation...but the guilty person, figuring that no one could see them in the darkness, would only pretend to pull the tail but would not touch it at all.

  For the birds: The Swiss Army keeps 20,000 carrier pigeons for emergency communications.

  MODERN METHOD

  The first modern lie detector was invented by Cesare Lombroso, an Italian criminologist, in 1895. His device measured changes in pulse and blood pressure. Then, in 1914, another researcher named Vittorio Benussi invented a machine that measured changes in breathing rate. But it wasn’t until 1921 that John A. Larson, a medical student at the University of California, invented a machine that measured pulse, blood pressure, and breathing rate simultaneously. His machine became known as a polygraph, because it measured three types of physiological changes. Today’s polygraphs use these methods, as well as more sophisticated measurements.

  THE QUESTIONS

  The most common questioning method is called the Control Question Test (CQT), in which the polygraph operator asks three types of questions: neutral questions, key questions, and control questions.

  • Neutral questions like “What kind of car do you drive?” are designed to measure the suspect’s general level of nervousness, because nearly anyone who takes a polygraph test is going to be nervous.

  • Key, or “guilty,” questions quiz the suspect on information that only the guilty person would know. (For example: If the person taking the test were suspected of murdering someone, and the murder weapon was a knife, questions about knives would be considered key questions.)

  • Control, or “innocent,” questions would be indistinguishable from key questions by someone who did not have knowledge of the crime—but the guilty person would know. Questions about weapons not used in a murder would be considered control questions.

  Pirates thought that wearing an earring in a pierced ear improved their eyesight.

  An innocent person with no knowledge of the murder weapon would show the same level of nervousness during all the weapon questions—but the guilty person would be more nervous during questions about knives—and would be easy to identify using a polygraph...at least in theory.

  BEATING THE SYSTEM

  Modern-day lie detectors are pretty sophisticated, but they have the same flaw that the ancients methods did—they all assume that the liar, out of guilt or fear of discovery, will have some kind of involuntary physical response every time they lie...but that isn’t necessarily the case, according to most experts. “I don’t think there’s any medical or scientific evidence which tends to establish that your blood pressure elevates, that you perspire more freely or that your pulse quickens when you tell a lie,” says William G. Hundley, a defense lawyer.

  Still, many people believe that the polygraph is a useful tool when used in concert with other investigative methods, especially when they’re used on ordinary people who don’t know how to cheat. “It’s a great psychological tool,” says Plato Cacheris, another defense lawyer. “You take the average guy and tell him you’re going to give him a poly, and he’s concerned enough to believe it will disclose any deception on his part.” (Note: Cacheris is famous for having represented non-average guy Aldrich Ames, a CIA spy who passed a lie detector test in 1991 and then went on to sell more than $2.5 million worth of secrets to the Russians before he was finally caught in 1994.)

  FAKIN’ IT

  Two tricks to help you beat a lie detector:

  • Curl your toes or press your feet d
own against the floor while answering the “innocent” questions. It can raise the polygraph readings to the same range as the “guilty” questions, which can either make you appear innocent or invalidate the results.

  • Stick a tack in your shoe and press your big toe against the sharp point during the “innocent” questions.

  Both toe-curling and stepping on a tack during the innocent questions have the same effect: they raise the stress level of your body.

  Sports stat: On average, for every 100,000 people who play football, 2,171 are seriously injured.

  VIVE LA DIFFERENCE!

  Researchers say that males and females are naturally different from one another in a number of unexpected ways. Here are a few of the things they’ve found out.

  Women are more likely to smile than men when delivering bad news.

  Toddler girls as young as two years old maintain eye contact with adults nearly twice as long as toddler boys do.

  At the age of four months, infant girls can distinguish between photographs of people they know and don’t know; most boys can’t.

  Did you have a nightmare last night? Women are twice as likely as men to say they did.

  In households that have them, males control the TV remote control 55% of the time; women have control 34% of the time.

  Doctors consider men obese when 25% of their body is composed of fat, and women obese when 30% is fat.

  Boys fight more than girls do. The difference begins at about age two.

  Fifty-nine percent of females—but only 4% of males—say they didn’t enjoy the first time they had sex.

  The average male brain is 14 percent larger than the average female brain.

  Seventy-one percent of car-accident victims are male; only 29% are female.

  On average, a man’s skin ages 10 years more slowly than a woman’s does.